Gift cards are a popular and practical solution for allowing customers to share their love of your business with others. Gift cards are more personal than giving cash, making gift-buying simple. With Lightspeed, you can capitalize on the popularity of gift cards by making it easy for your customers to buy and redeem them from your business, both in-store and online.

Where you decide to sell gift cards and allow customers to redeem them is up to you and depends on two factors:

• Your gift card settings
• If you also have an online store

You can find your registered gift cards by navigating to Customers > Gift cards in either Retail POS or eCom (if you also have an online store).

Here, you will see an overview of your gift cards and a full list of all gift cards sold. You can learn more about managing gift cards, including tracking gift cards, viewing balances and details of a particular gift card, and transferring gift card balances.

You can select the Gift card settings button to configure your gift card settings. This includes enabling gift cards to be sold in-store and/or online, setting predetermined gift card sales amounts, and limiting the minimum and maximum amounts that can be applied to gift cards.

You can also customize the available images for gift cards sold online.

Any changes you make to your gift card settings will be applied both in-store and online (if you have both sales channels enabled).

Once you've changed your gift card settings, you're ready to sell gift cards! Learn more about selling, redeeming, recharging, resending, and cancelling gift cards.

Frequently asked questions (FAQs)

• You can refund a sale to a customer's gift card, but you can't refund the purchase of a gift card. However, if your customer purchased their gift card online, you can give your customer a discount code instead.

• If you sell gift cards in the European Union and the United Kingdom, you're either selling single-purpose vouchers or multi-purpose vouchers. It's important to know the difference, as both types of vouchers need to be taxed differently.

  A gift card is considered a single-purpose voucher when, at the time of purchase, it's clear that the gift card will be spent on products that belong to one tax rate. In this case, taxes should be applied when the gift card is purchased, not when it's redeemed. 

  A gift card is considered a multi-purpose voucher when, at the time of purchase, it's not clear that the gift card will be spent on products that belong to one tax rate. This is the case if you sell products that belong to multiple tax rates. In this case, taxes should be applied when the gift card is redeemed, not when it's purchased.

  Right now, Lightspeed gift cards are considered multi-purpose vouchers. They're taxed when they're redeemed, not when they're purchased. Therefore, Lightspeed doesn't support single-purpose vouchers. If the gift cards you sell should be taxed like a single-purpose voucher, we recommend exporting the gift cards you've sold to calculate the taxes you need to submit to the tax authorities.

• Yes; that's the best part about Lightspeed gift cards. If you also have Lightspeed eCom, you just need to enable the eCom switch when you configure your gift card settings. This allows your customers to buy and redeem gift cards in your online store as well.

  Note: If you're using a multi-step checkout in your online store, your customers will only be able to enter their gift card code when they reach the step with the cart. To give your customers the best gift card experience possible, we recommend using a one-page or single-step checkout instead.

• Your gift card barcodes must be between 8-32 digits long. We also recommend using randomized numbers for each barcode. Sequential numbers (10001, 10002, for example) are easy to guess and can lead to fraudulent transactions. Randomized numbers also help prevent duplicate barcodes, which make your gift cards unusable.

• No, not right now. However, you can configure common amounts in your gift card settings. This way, they're fast and easy to select during checkout.

• Yes, but only if your user role has this permission enabled.

• While you can't customize the basic text of a gift card email, your customer can optionally add a personalized message when buying a gift card online. Additionally, your customer can choose which image to include in the gift card email. You can upload custom images as well as use the stock images provided.

• A free Delivered by email method will display if your customer is only buying a gift card.

  

• No, a gift card can't be added to a quote because it's not considered a product in Lightspeed eCom.

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