Frequently Asked Questions

Selling Gift Cards

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Does the extension support physical gift cards?

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At the moment, the extension only supports digital/virtual gift cards. Printed vouchers and physical gift cards are not supported.

Is there a way to let customers choose a custom price/value when purchasing a prepaid gift card?

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Yes. This is possible using Name Your Price in addition to Gift Cards.

What types of gift cards can I offer with this plugin?

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The extension only supports prepaid, multi-purpose digital gift cards at the moment.

Can I issue promotional gift cards with this extension?

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No. The extension only supports prepaid, multi-purpose digital gift cards.

Prepaid gift cards must be treated as a method of payment, whereas promotional gift cards work just like coupons. Here’s an example to help you understand why prepaid gift card codes should not be issued freely:

A WooCommerce store owner customized Gift Cards to be able to issue prepaid gift card codes freely. Then, she issued a $110 gift card code and sent it to a customer. The customer decided to use the gift card to purchase a product that costs $100 (+10% VAT). Because prepaid gift cards are treated as a method of payment, the line item included in the customer’s order recorded a sale of $100 + $10 VAT, and the merchant issued an invoice with the same information, listing “Gift Cards” as a method of payment. As a result, the merchant was taxed for this sale in its entirety, although no payment was ever received for the issued gift card code.

If the gift card code of this example was a promotional one, its value would have been treated as a discount. Therefore, for the same $100 + $10 VAT purchase, the line item included in the customer’s order would record a $0 sale, and the merchant would not be taxed for it.

Is there a way to issue a prepaid gift card for a customer for free, or to purchase a prepaid gift card on a customer’s behalf?

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In general, prepaid gift card codes should not be issued freely.

However, in some cases you may want to order a prepaid gift card on a customer’s behalf, or send a gift card code without processing an online payment. Some examples:

• You accept orders by phone and a customer wishes to purchase a gift card.
• You have a physical store location in addition to an online store, and a customer wishes to pay for an e-gift card in-store.
• You would like to send a gift card to a customer instead of issuing a refund.

To do this:

• Create a manual order.
• Manually add the gift card product to the order.
• Click the Edit button under the gift card you just added to configure its From, To, Message and Delivery Date fields.
• Set the total of your gift card to zero.
• Make other edits to the order as needed, and finally save and complete the order.

Note that the issued gift card will have a value equal to the Regular Price of the gift card product, even though you manually turned the total of that specific order item into 0.

Is there a way to prevent specific gift card codes from being added to customer accounts?

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The plugin does not provide an option to mark specific gift card products as non-redeemable. However, there is a way to do this site-wide. For assistance with this, please reach out to our team!

Is it possible to purchase gift cards using the balance from previously redeemed gift cards?

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No. The plugin prevents customers from purchasing gift cards using their gift cards balance, or manually entered gift cards.

Does the extension support quick-pay buttons?

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No, Gift Cards does not support quick-pay buttons. Quick-pay buttons added by WooCommerce Payments in the single product page are automatically hidden from gift card pages.

What happens when a gift card product is put on sale?

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When a customer purchases a gift card product with a Sale Price, the issued gift card code will have a face value equal to the Regular Price of the gift card product by default.

Please consult with your accounting team before making prepaid, multi-purpose gift cards available on sale.

How are prepaid gift cards accounted for?

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When using a prepaid gift card to pay for an order, partially or fully, cart/order line items are not discounted and product/order revenue is recorded in full under Analytics > Products and Analytics > Revenue.

However WooCommerce does not natively support multiple payment methods per order. To work around this limitation, the plugin modifies the order total of every order that is paid with gift cards, partially or fully. Plugins that read or display order totals will not be able to correctly identify gift cards as a payment method, unless an integration is written to support Gift Cards.

How does WooCommerce report the revenue from gift card purchases and orders that are paid using gift cards?

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When a prepaid, multi-purpose gift cart is purchased, tax is not assessed and the cash received is treated as a liability. Later, when the gift card is used to pay for a product, the liability shifts into a sale and tax is assessed as usual.

To account for this, Gift Cards integrates with WooCommerce Analytics to ensure that:

• Purchases of gift card products are counted towards the Gross Sales, but not towards the Net Sales reported under Analytics > Revenue.
• Payments with prepaid gift cards are counted towards the reported Gross Sales, Net Sales and Taxes.

Is there a way to sell a prepaid gift card on subscription?

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The plugin does not allow you to create gift cards using Subscription-type products. However, it is possible to offer a gift card product on subscription using the All Products for WooCommerce Subscriptions add-on. Note that when a gift card is purchased on subscription, a new gift card code will be sent to the recipient at every billing interval.

Can I use a gift card, or a customer’s gift cards account balance to pay for a subscription renewal?

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Yes. Subscribers can pay for subscription renewals using their gift cards balance. In the event the balance cannot cover the whole cost of the renewal, the remaining cost will be covered using the payment gateway that the customer selected when signing up. For details please refer to the Compatibility and Integrations document section on WooCommerce Subscriptions.

Can I use the coupon code input to apply gift card codes?

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Yes. The plugin makes it possible to re-use the existing coupon code form input to apply gift card codes, instead of using the “Have a Gift Card?” form. This functionality is available as a free feature plugin.

Is there a way to conditionally prevent customers from paying with gift card codes/balance? For example depending on their order total, cart contents, role, applied coupons, or other variables?

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Yes! Conditional Shipping and Payments allows you to use conditional logic to restrict payments with gift card codes/balance in many scenarios.

Is there a way to prevent customers from paying with specific payment gateways when purchasing prepaid gift cards?

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Yes, with Conditional Shipping and Payments. The extension allows you to restrict payment gateways depending on the presence of gift card products in the cart.

Is there a way to prevent customers from paying with specific payment gateways, when their order is partially paid using gift card codes?

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This is possible with Conditional Shipping and Payments.

Is there a way to list gift cards on Instagram?

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No. Gift cards are Virtual products. Currently, Instagram only supports Physical products.

At w​hat time are scheduled Gift Cards delivered?

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Scheduled gift card codes are delivered on the picked delivery date, at approximately the same time that the gift card product was added to the cart.

For example, if a gift card product was added to the cart on January 10th, at 14:17 and was scheduled for delivery on January 25th, it will be delivered on January 25th at 14:17.

The delivery date/time is calculated using the timezone of the customer as reference.

Gift Card E-mails

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E-mails are not sent/delivered to gift card code recipients.

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When a customer places an order that contains a gift card product, the plugin creates a new code that appears under WooCommerce > Gift Cards. The code is created only when:

• the order is paid; or
• its Status is changed to “Completed”.

Depending on the specified delivery date, the code will be e-mailed to the specified recipient(s):

• Within a few minutes, if the gift card was purchased for immediate delivery.
• On the specified date, at roughly the same time, if the gift card was purchased for delivery at a future date.

If you are experiencing issues with undelivered e-mails, make sure that your WordPress hosting environment supports background processing through Action Scheduler, the task queuing system built into WooCommerce. WooCommerce core uses Action Scheduler for many important tasks, such as installing updates, while Gift Cards depends on Action Scheduler for processing and e-mailing Gift Card codes to recipients.

To find out if Action Scheduler works, go to Tools > Scheduled Actions, and check the Pending tasks in your system. If the oldest Pending task is more than a few days old, it might be a good idea to reach out to your host or system administrator and confirm that:

• WP Cron is enabled on your system; and that
• your system is able to “talk to itself” (perform loopback requests).

Managing Orders

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Is it possible to apply gift card codes in manually-created orders?

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Yes! To apply a gift card to a manually-created (or editable) order:

1. Add some items to an order, calculate totals and save it.
2. While the order is still editable, click the Apply Gift Card button.
3. Enter a gift card code.

Note that:

• It is not possible to manually control the amount debited on the gift cards you apply. When you apply a gift card to an order, the plugin will attempt to use up as much as it can to cover the cost of the items included in the order up to that point.
• The amount debited on any applied gift cards does not change as you add or remove items. One way to change it is to remove and re-apply gift card codes as needed, remembering to Recalculate totals after each change.

Does the plugin support refunds to gift cards?

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Yes, refunds to gift cards are supported.

Other

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Is there a way to edit a text string in the plugin?

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You can use a plugin such as Loco Translate to edit text strings. This is the best way to customize WooCommerce text strings, as the edits will not be overwritten when plugins are updated.

After activating Loco Translate:

1. Go to Loco Translate > Plugins and click Gift Cards.
2. Click on New Language.
3. Choose the desired or your site’s default language in the dropdown menu.
4. Select Custom in the Choose a location option.
5. Press Start Translating.
6. Search for the string you want to edit.
7. Select it and add your modification.
8. Press Save.

For more details visit Generating a New Translation.

Questions & Support

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