Gift Cards

[digitalv]

Thought I would share an experience one of my customers had recently with their online store, because it's a really neat concept that I think others could benefit from.

This client sells natural products online (soap and air fresheners and stuff they make themselves) and with every order they were including a $5 coupon that customers could use on their next order. The redemption rate of those coupons was pretty low though. Their loyal customers used them, but most of the time they were just thrown away. They ended up signing up for Card9 - for those who aren't familiar, it's sort of a "gift card gateway" that works like authorize.net but it's all virtual money where you create a batch of gift cards that are "worth" a certain amount and upload a graphic and they create real plastic cards and keep track of the balances when people spend them on your site.

So my customer calls me to integrate the gateway so they could accept these gift cards in their online store and instead of throwing the $5 coupon in the box they started throwing in a $5 plastic gift card instead. Now keep in mind this is entirely cashless (they're just discounting the order by $5 so it's still the same effect as a coupon), I don't know what it is, but I guess something about that little piece of plastic that says "Gift Card" instead of "Coupon" makes people feel like they have to use it. What's funny is that my customer doesn't sell a single item that's under $5, and people were either coming back to spend their gift card or giving it to a friend and getting a new customer out of it.

Now that I have the integration code written I'm gonna see if I can sell it to some of my other ecommerce customers who are using the same shopping cart :) hehe.

Anyway, thought it was pretty neat idea that continues to work for them. I've had customers ask me about gift cards before and usually you have to put up whatever money the card is worth and then they give you a visa or amex that's worth that much, but the whole cashless spin on doing gift cards seems pretty interesting.

[lorax]

Very curious but it makes sense in a way. Probably for the same reason people like to read a real book instead of digital one. We have a desire to see and hold something real.

[Super_Chunk]

That sounds really good! We've had properly printed gift certificates but they are paper, and the redemption rate is very low. I can see how this would work. Thanks for sharing.

[RhinoFish]

card9 looks pretty expensive. are their other choices?

my cart has gift cert capability, so i'm thinking i can produce the cert numbers and have someone print cards, and test this idea out. the card9 thing seems kloogey, adding a third party to the mix of people involved during the checkout process, i like morphing my own gift certs into my own tangible gift cards - anyone done that kind of thing?

[digitalv]

It's $1.25 a card which is a little high, I haven't asked if they have any bulk rates. In fact I think I'll do that today, even 99 cents a card would be more attractive. I haven't found anyone else doing short-run cards like this that also has a system that keeps track of the balances.

The way I did the integration for my customer was using the shopping cart's built-in crediting system (where customers can have an account balance). Basically I just made a page for redeeming gift cards, and they enter the card number and that page checks the balance against the API, zero's it out, and issues an account credit in the cart for whatever was on the card. That way I didn't have to alter the checkout process, it's still handled by the cart and they're just paying with an account credit.

If you have a gift certificate number you might be able to find a company that does plastic business cards for around 50 cents each and just stick a printed label on the back with your cert number as an alternative.