Guide: Selling physical gift cards

Gift Up! supports selling and managing your physical gift cards alongside your digital gift cards easily. 

We don't actually provide you with the gift cards, so you'll have to design and get them printed yourself. They can be any kind of stock you like, from the de-facto plastic gift cards, through to a bespoke gift package; it's up to you, we just allow them to be sold online/in-store and facilitate the management of the codes & balances in our platform. 

Our approach has the following benefits: 

• You'll have a consolidated platform for the management of your gift cards
• As a result, your gift cards can then be redeemed online, in-store or via your POS as you require, all from one platform
• You can sell your physical gift cards online and in-store, as well as offering an instant/email gift card solution (optional)
• You get to design your own gift card stock according to your brand standards & requirements

What about codes?

The very first question around selling physical gift cards is whether codes need to be printed on the physical gift cards in advance or not, and what does Gift Up! support. 

The short answer is that we support both situations; you can either:

1. You generate codes ahead of time and print them on the gift card in advance (our recommended approach). 
2. Let us generate the code automatically when you sell a gift card, and you simply write the code on your physical gift cards when you ship it out.

If you want to get codes pre-printed on your gift cards, we usually recommend getting your printing company to generate the random codes, or use this website to generate them. For clarification, we don't need to know about them in advance, you just tell us the code on the gift cards you're shipping/handing out when you sell one (more on that below). 

Either way, do make an effort to make sure the codes are simple to type, for your sake and your customers. A 6-character, upper-case alphanumeric code is perfect for this, and is what we do by default.

Selling physical gift cards online

To sell your physical gift cards online, you'll need to enable postal orders in your Gift Up! account. Once that's done, your customers will be able to choose to get their gift card delivered by your postal service (or in-store collection if you wish to offer that) and you'll have to prepare and send the gift card every time one is ordered. 

Charging for shipping

You can charge for the physical gift card by applying a charge to the shipping option. It's all part of the process of enabling postal orders in your Gift Up! account.

How do I get notified about an online physical gift card sale?

Every dashboard admin in your Gift Up! account by default will get an email notification about the new postal order. These can be turned off if required on a user-by-user basis in your account's notification settings.

The email contains all the information you'll need to fulfil the order, you just then mark the order as posted in the dashboard.

If you've got pre-printed codes on your gift cards

When a customer buys a postal gift card online, we generate a provisional code for the gift card. When you fulfil the order you can change the provisionally generated code on the Gift Up! gift card record to match your physical gift card's code. 

Selling physical gift cards in-person

If you're planning on selling your physical gift cards in-store, or at an event, etc... you'll need to take payment for the gift card(s) using whatever payment system you normally use in-person. 

Once you've taken payment for the gift card(s) you need to create a gift card in Gift Up! When you do that, you'll be given the chance to change the code on the gift card to match your physical gift card code (if you've pre-printed them):

How to create a gift card in Gift Up!

Common questions:

Redeeming via your POS terminal?

If you plan to redeem gift cards via your POS terminal, you'll want to read this guide first. Once you've decided the best approach from that guide for your business, get in touch with us; we're here to help you sell gift cards. It can appear complex, depending on how you want to sell them, but it's a solvable problem, and we're here to help navigate you through the complexity. 

Just want to sell physical gift cards?

No problem, just disable email delivery in shipping settings

Do we recommend any printers?

We don't recommend or have any partnerships with any particular printer for your gift cards. But a Google search for "print plastic gift cards" will get you started. If pressed, we'd look at https://www.madebyoomph.com

How to generate codes for your gift cards

Gift Up! supports any kind of code; numbers only, characters only, a mixture, or a completely custom format. So long as the codes are less than 50 characters in length, then they can be used in Gift Up! 

There are various ways to generate codes for your printed gift cards, you can ask us to generate some via a support ticket, or you can generate your own. We like https://www.randomcodes.co.uk/.

Do make an effort to make sure the codes are simple to type, for your sake and your customers. A 6-character, upper-case alphanumeric code is perfect for this, and is what we do by default.

Are there any specifications for the gift cards for use in Gift Up?

Not really. The gift cards themselves can be of any size and format that you need, all that needs to be present is a code on there, either written on it by hand once sold, or pre-printed on there, or encapsulated in a barcode (or a mixture of all of this!). We support a few barcode formats out of the box, including Code128, Code39, Data Matrix, PDF417 and QR codes.