Stripe subscriptions & coupons

Connect Gift Up to your Stripe account, and we will enable your Gift Up gift card codes to be used as Coupons in your Stripe account. Stripe Coupons are supported if you use Stripe Subscriptions (a.k.a. Stripe Billing), Invoices and Stripe Checkout (their new standalone checkout system).

Connect Gift Up to your Stripe account

Head over to Integrations in the Gift Up dashboard and locate the Stripe Checkout & Billing card.

1) Click connect, and you'll be shown a form where you can enter your Stripe.com API keys.

2) Login to your Stripe account and head over to Developers > API keys in your Stripe dashboard https://dashboard.stripe.com/apikeys and create a new Secret Key. We recommend giving the new Secret Key a name like "Gift Up!" so you know who is using it in the future.

3) Copy & paste the newly created "Secret key" into Gift Up and click "Connect". Do not copy a secret key that contains a "..." in the middle of it, e.g. "sk_live_...p006", as this is a redacted key and cannot be used. You must create a new Secret Key in order to view the full Secret Key.

4) Click Connect, and we'll test to ensure the keys you've entered are working. If they are, you're all good to go!

How Gift Up works with Stripe Coupons

When you sell a gift card in your Gift Up checkout, we will automatically create a coupon matching the gift card balance in Stripe.com and a promotional code for that coupon that matches the 5 character alphanumeric code that we create.

A note on the format for gift card codes

Gift Up lets you change the format of your gift card codes, however, Stripe do not support such a wide array of characters as Gift Up! You'll need to keep this in mind when changing the format of your gift card codes. Stripe only supports the following characters: 0-9, a-z, A-Z.

Any gift cards that have codes with characters that Stripe doesn't support, won't be synced.

The gift recipient (the only person who knows that code) can then come to your online store (using Stripe Checkout), and place an order, using this discount code against any of the items you sell.

We fully manage the sync between Stripe and Gift Up! (with Gift Up being the master record of balance), meaning if you reduce the balance in Gift Up we'll reflect that in Stripe shortly after (usually within a couple of seconds) and if an order is placed using the gift card (actually a discount coupon) we'll redeem the gift card in Gift Up shortly after. It's all handled for you, automatically.

Applying a coupon to a subscription in Stripe

When you add a coupon to a subscription in Stripe, an invoice is immediately generated by Stripe with the coupon associated to it, and automatically applying the maximum possible discount to the invoice.

Stripe also immediately uses up the coupon, and we immediately redeem the invoice's applied discount amount off of the gift card in Gift Up and if there is any remaining balance on the gift card after this, we transfer this remaining balance to the customer's balance in Stripe, thereby allowing them to automatically use the remaining balance on any future charges applied to them in Stripe.

Applying a coupon to an invoice in Stripe

When you associate a coupon to an invoice in Stripe, if that coupon is a gift card we will immediately redeem the discounted amount off the gift card in Gift Up and if there is any remaining balance on the gift card, we will transfer this remaining balance to the customer's balance in Stripe, thereby allowing them to automatically use the remaining balance on any future charges applied to them in Stripe.

Applying a coupon to a customer in Stripe

When you associate a coupon to a customer in Stripe, if that coupon is a gift card, we will immediately transfer the remaining balance from the gift card straight into the customer's balance in Stripe and disassociate the coupon from the customer. That way, any future invoices that are charged to the customer will automatically use the customer's balance first.

Using coupons in a Stripe Checkout session

When a gift card is used in a Stripe Checkout session for a one-time purchase (i.e. not a subscription checkout/item), we immediately redeem the gift card in full in Gift Up! This is because it is not possible to apply a discount coupon that fully covers the value of the checkout/item being purchased in Stripe. This is because Stripe does not allow a zero value order to be placed as part of a Checkout session. In other words, you can not have a gift card (which is represented as a Coupon in your Stripe account) fully cover the cost of a Checkout, which you would normally expect from a gift card being used.

Gift cards that fully cover the cart value for one-time purchases

Unfortunately, you are not able to issue a gift card that fully covers the cart value because a key limitation of Stripe's Checkout platform is that it must have a chargeable value greater than $0.50 (or local equivalent). As Gift Up issued gift cards get synced as discount coupons in Stripe's platform (which is the only possible way), and a discount coupon that leads to a $0 chargeable cart is disallowed, you are therefore unable to have a gift card that covers a cart's full value.

This is a Stripe limitation, please direct complaints to Stripe directly 😊

When creating a session using Stripe's API: Create a Session, you must pass in the property allow_promotion_codes=true as specified in the documentation to enable the usage of coupons in your Checkout Session. And then the customer will need to enter the gift card code we issue in the "Add promotion code" field on the payment screen: