Omnichannel gift cards for your Shopify store.

Easily integrate your external gift card provider to give customers a seamless cross-channel experience.

balance-checker.js
cardigan.js
cardigan.api.checkBalance({
  number,
  pin,
  onSuccess: (card) => displayCardBalance(card)
})

Introduction

Getting started

Jump straight to the section you're interested in, or read on for a high-level overview of Cardigan.

Installation

How to get Cardigan installed on your Shopify store.

Profiles

How to connect Cardigan to your external gift card provider.

Online store

How to expose customer-facing functionality in your Shopify theme.

Point of sale

How to extend your gift card program into your physical stores.

Overview

Cardigan is a Shopify App that allows merchants to provide their customers with omnichannel gift card experiences.

Why Cardigan?

While Shopify provides its merchants with native gift card functionality, merchants will often leverage a separate provider to operate as the source of truth for their gift card program. This can be due to:

  • the need for integration into other systems (such as POS systems or ERPs);
  • financial requirements around auditing, compliance, or reporting;
  • operational requirements with vendors or suppliers;
  • legacy technology or business choices.

Whatever the reason, if the provider does not have a supported integration with Shopify, customers can be left with a poor experience as they are unable to purchase cards online for use in store or elsewhere, and vice versa. As customer expectations around online commerce continue to rise, this lack of omnichannel gift card support can lead to increased customer support load, negative customer sentiment, and ultimately loss of customer lifetime value.

Cardigan offers a solution to this problem by providing an integration bridge between Shopify and external gift card providers, delivering a seamless gift card experience to customers while giving merchants control over their choice of gift card provider.

How it works

Cardigan can be installed into a Shopify store just like any other Shopify App. Once installed, you configure a profile specifying which external gift card provider to use and how to connect to their API.

From there, Cardigan does four things.

Selling gift cards. Customers can buy gift cards from your online store, with drag-and-drop theme blocks capturing the recipient's details, or from your physical stores through Shopify POS - including activating physical card stock held at the counter.

Redeeming gift cards. Customers can redeem their cards in the Shopify checkout, from your cart page, or in store through POS. Cardigan mirrors external cards into Shopify as native gift cards, so redemption is secure and seamless for the customer while the balance continues to live with your provider.

Keeping the two in sync. Once live, Cardigan acts as an integration bridge between Shopify and your provider, coordinating provisioning, redemption, balance and refund requests - including across multiple provider accounts where your business needs them.

Automating around it. Shopify Flow triggers and actions let you build gift card events into your own workflows, and scheduled exports deliver a daily feed of gift card activity to your data warehouse or reconciliation process.

For partner agencies and headless builds, everything above is also available through the Cardigan.js client library and the REST API.

Where customers can redeem

Redeeming gift cards in the Shopify checkout requires Shopify Plus, as it relies on checkout extensions.

Your staff can redeem in Shopify POS on any plan. Stores without Plus can also offer cart redemption as a fallback online, subject to some limitations.

Origin story

The first version of Cardigan was built out at Shopify Plus Partner agency Disco Labs in response to the needs of their clientele (typically larger merchants with specific integration needs). Over time, the need for solutions like Cardigan became more and more apparent, leading to the release of Cardigan as a standalone product available to all merchants.

Getting help

Having worked with thousands of merchants and partner agencies over the years, we know how critical effective support is. The Cardigan team aims to provide all of our customers and partners with timely support throughout the application lifecycle - from solutions to implementation and beyond.

Sales support

If you're a Shopify merchant or a Shopify partner agency interested in leveraging Cardigan to provide an omnichannel gift card experience, please reach out to our sales team: sales@runcardigan.com.

Customer support

If you're an existing Cardigan customer looking for help or to report a problem, please use the help links inside the app in your Shopify admin, or reach out directly to support: help@runcardigan.com.

Partnerships support

If you're a gift card provider interested in a partnership to provide your existing customers with an omnichannel experience on Shopify and grow your target audience, please reach out to our partnerships team: partnerships@runcardigan.com.

Next
Installation