Gift card purchases

Cardigan allows the configuration of a range of behaviour related to the purchase of new gift cards through your online store and (if enabled) Shopify POS.

Before any of this applies, Cardigan needs to know which products are gift cards - see Gift card matching.

Provisioning

You can select one of two "triggers" to determine when a digital gift card present in an order will be provisioned (passed along to your provider).

Provision when order is paid

This first option is the default and ensures that cards aren't sent to customers before funds are captured. Often, if you're using an authorize-and-capture flow, your Shopify instance will be configured to run eg fraud checks prior to capturing funds.

Provision when tag applied to order

This second option provides you with more flexibility around when cards will be provisioned. It can be used if your system has more complex checks or workflows that may need to be completed after an order is marked as paid, or in situations where payment capture is driven by fulfilment rather than the other way around.

When used in combination with Shopify Flow, this configuration option opens the door to whatever provisioning workflow your business requires.

If selecting this option, you must also specify the (case-sensitive) trigger tag.

Scheduled delivery

Where a customer chooses a future delivery date, the card isn't provisioned when the trigger fires. Instead Cardigan holds it and provisions it on the requested date, so the recipient receives it at the right time.

Scheduled cards are still subject to your provisioning trigger - a card scheduled for a future date won't be issued if the order hasn't met the trigger condition by then.

Some providers accept a delivery date directly rather than relying on Cardigan to hold the card. See your provider's page for which applies.

Fulfillment

You can choose whether Cardigan will automatically mark digital gift card line items in an order as "fulfilled" once they have been successfully provisioned with your provider.

This is on by default, but can be turned off if you have specific workflow requirements that will handle the fulfillment of these line items.

Customer notifications

When Cardigan fulfills gift card line items for you, you can additionally choose whether the customer should be notified of the fulfillment. If enabled, Shopify will send its standard fulfillment confirmation notification (the "your order has been fulfilled" style email) when the line items are marked as fulfilled.

This is off by default. Before turning it on, keep in mind that your gift card provider may send its own notification when a card is provisioned - enabling both can mean the customer hears about the same gift card twice.

Line item property names

The additional information captured when a customer buys a gift card - who it's for, an optional greeting, and so on - is attached to the order's line items as properties. Cardigan reads those properties when provisioning the card.

Each property name can be changed if the defaults clash with something else in your setup, though most stores never need to.

The leading underscore is a Shopify convention that hides the property from the customer in the cart and at checkout. If you rename a property, keeping the underscore is strongly recommended.

If you're using the product form block, these properties are written for you. If you're building a custom integration, your form inputs need to use these names.

Searchable filter

This one deserves a note, because it has no equivalent in the drag-and-drop blocks.

Whatever value you attach becomes part of the card's searchable content in the Cardigan admin, letting you find cards by something meaningful to your business - a campaign code, a corporate client reference, a batch identifier. It's most useful for stores issuing cards programmatically or in bulk.

Per-variant settings

Some behaviour can be set on individual product variants rather than store-wide, which is useful when different gift card products need to behave differently.

These are set as metafields in the cardigan namespace on the variant, and Cardigan picks up changes automatically as you edit your products.

Where the same value can come from either a line item property or a variant metafield, the line item property wins - so a customer's choice at the point of purchase takes precedence over the variant default.