Sell Gift Cards with FoxyShop

Our gift card feature lets you sell gift cards on your FoxyShop site, and when ordered, automatically creates the card code and emails it to the gift recipient. Here’s how to set it up.

How Gift Cards Work

Gift cards are similar to coupons in a few ways. Just as a “coupon” in Foxy defines the coupon itself, and the “coupon code” is the important bit that’s entered by the customer, gift cards similarly have “gift card codes” that are the individual resource the customer enters onto the checkout. Unlike coupon codes, however, gift card codes can have balances, allowing them to be reused until the balance is reduced to zero. Also, unlike coupon codes, gift cards will apply to shipping costs.

Though Foxy provides a number of ways to restrict and limit gift cards, most merchants will not use any restrictions. Further, though Foxy allows setting expiration dates, “normal” gift cards in most countries/states/provinces/regions cannot legally be expired. If you plan on using some of the functionality allowing you to restrict gift cards, be sure to check the laws for the locations you sell into.

Selling & Automatically Provisioning Gift Cards with FoxyShop

Gift Cards are created in our newer admin at https://admin.foxy.io. This admin has all the menu options needed to set it up. You can use your legacy admin credentials on the newer admin.

Note for API users: You can also do the setup with the API, but instructions for that will not be covered here. Please see our gift cards article in the regular Foxy wiki for API request details and our API documentation.

Provisioning the gift card

When setting up the product, you can use an existing category for your gift card or create a new category. You’ll need to pass this category with the add-to-cart, and when this product is purchased, Foxy will use the email template that you set up to notify the gift recipient at the specified gift recipient email address with a newly-generated gift card code.

To create a new gift card category, you can do this in the newer admin at https://admin.foxy.io. Check to make sure that your settings for the Delivery Options and Emails are set up as in the screenshot below. You can opt to not send an email to the recipient, but you should make sure that you know for sure that you don’t want to send it.

Next, you’ll create the gift card in the admin at admin.foxy.io. Once that’s completed, you can enable it as a “product” that can be purchased by your customers, and delivered (via email) to a gift recipient. To enable using the admin, you’ll set up the provisioning section:

The Allow customers to buy this gift card option can be set to unchecked to disallow new gift cards from being purchased by customers. The Min and Max balance values allow you to set minimum and maximum values for gift cards that are added to the cart, to prevent values outside of a desired range.

Creating the gift card product

You will create a gift card add-to-cart within FoxyShop using the following as a guideline:

name, price, gift_recipient_email, category for the gift card, and code should all be required. The code should match gift_card_ plus the sku from the gift card. So, if you gave the gift card a sku of widgets as in the example above, the code would be gift_card_widgets.

• The matching code in the example screenshot will result in the product showing in the cart with a product name of “Gift Card”.
• The gift_recipient_email submitted by the customer must be a valid email address. If you’re using the DEFAULT category for your gift card email, you don’t need to pass a category.
• Optionally, you can use a variant of gift_recipient_message to show on the default gift card email to the gift recipient.

For tips on customizing the gift card email, you can see our article below. Note that this is advanced:

Customizing the Gift Card Email

Notes & Considerations

Gift Card UI

Gift cards can only be viewed, created, modified, etc., via the new Foxy admin at admin.foxy.io, or via the API. Support will not be added to the old admin.

How Gift Cards are Attached to Customers

When a customer uses a gift card code (or on creation, if desired) and does not check out as a guest, that gift card code will be attached to the customer record. After that point, only that customer will be able to use the gift card code at checkout. If a different customer attempts to use that gift card code, the customer will see an error.

Note also that gift card codes can be attached to customers via the API.

Gift card codes that are attached to a customer will automatically be applied when that customer logs in on the checkout.

Coming soon: Customers will be able to attach a gift card to their customer account from the customer portal.

Accounting Considerations for Cash v. Accrual Based Bookkeeping

Before you start selling gift cards, you’ll likely want to chat with your accountant to ensure you’re not setting yourself up for headaches. If you sell a $100 gift card, you get $100 now, but you’ll generally also have a $100 liability to account for. Just make sure you know what you’re getting into so you can avoid problems.

Multiple Currencies

A gift card in one currency cannot be used if the cart is in a different currency.

Gift Cards & Subscriptions

If a gift card is applied to a subscription, the gift card will continue to apply to the subscription until its balance has been completed used up. The gift card will remain attached to the subscription, but will just not apply any discount. This means that if further balance is added to the gift card, it would start applying additional discounts to the subscription at the next renewal.

Note that even if the gift card reduces the cost of the subscription to $0, the customer will still need to provide a payment method on the checkout. Then, once the gift card balance is exhausted, the customers saved payment method will begin being charged for the subscription renewal.

Taxes, Shipping, and Product Restrictions

If you set a product or category restriction on the gift card, but the transaction contains items that are not covered by the discount, taxes and shipping will still be discounted using the gift card balance.

For instance, let’s say you have a $30 Shirt and $30 Pants in the cart, $6 taxes, and $10 shipping. The customer applies a $100 gift card that only applies to Shirts. The discount applied would be $46.

If you have a use case where this causes a problem and where coupons wouldn’t make more sense, please do reach out to let us know about it.