Can my customers buy the gift cards in my shopping cart/checkout instead?

You probably already use a great e-commerce platform, like Shopify, Ecwid or WooCommerce, and maybe you'd like to just add an extra product called "Gift Cards" and sell Gift Up! gift cards through your existing checkout, instead of installing our drop-in checkout. 

We don't offer this out of the box for 3 reasons:

1. Most customers either buy a gift card or they buy regular items from you. It's not that common to place an order for themselves and a gift card at the same time, in our observations. 
2. The data required to sell and deliver a gift card is rather different to a normal order (we need recipient emails, messages etc... and your cart collects shipping addresses, which are not required usually)
3. Technically speaking, depending on the shopping platform, it's either impossible, or it's a lot more complex to sell gift cards using your cart

When we considered all the above, we concluded that it was not worth the effort to attempt to develop a more cart integrated purchasing experience. But, if you really want to sell gift cards using your regular cart, you can, but it's not straight forward and does require some work from you. 

How to use your shopping cart to sell the gift cards

Firstly you'll need to create a product called "Gift Cards" (or similar) and sell it via your checkout, but you'd also have to collect the recipient's email address, message etc... at some point. You can do this during checkout if your platform allows it, or you can reach out to the customer afterwards to ask for those details. 

Once you've got an order in your e-commerce platform, you'll then have to create a gift card in Gift Up! We've got a few ways you can do that:

1. Create the gift card in our dashboard by hand
2. Create the gift card by using our automation partners, Zapier, assuming your e-commerce platform integrates with Zapier also (reasonably likely)
3. Create the gift card via our Developer API

All of these will work, but you need to consider if your cart platform can gather and store the extra information that our dedicated checkout collects, like recipient email address and what date the gift card should be sent etc... Shopping carts do not allow generally allow the collection of this extra information, and if yours does, then you can certainly go the extra mile and make it happen for your customers using one of the 3 options outlined above. 

This is usually why we recommend just using our drop-in checkout alongside your regular shopping cart.