Notifications

Cardigan allows you to provide a list of one or more email addresses to be notified in the event the system detects a failure or potential issue related to gift card provisioning, activation, redemption or refunds.

Recipients

Notification recipients are managed in the Cardigan Configuration page, under Notifications.

You can add as many addresses as you need, and each is validated when you save. Both a plain address and a named address are accepted:

jane.smith@example.com
Jane Smith <jane.smith@example.com>

We'd generally recommend a shared mailbox or group address rather than an individual's, so notifications keep reaching someone when people change roles.

What gets reported

Some of the types of issues that may be flagged include:

• Provisioning failures: a digital gift card couldn't be issued, for example as a result of an invalid recipient email address;
• Activation failures: a physical gift card couldn't be activated, for example due to a card number being invalid;
• Redemption failures: a card couldn't be redeemed, for example as a result of a double spend issue;
• Refund failures: a refund to a gift card couldn't be completed, for example because your provider couldn't be reached.

Each notification lists the affected cards along with the reason reported by your provider, so you can act on them without having to dig through the admin first.

Cards that haven't finished

Cardigan also reports cards whose provisioning, activation, redemption or refund is still in progress four hours after it began. These usually finish within seconds, so one that hasn't is listed separately in the same email. Some of these may already have reached your provider, so Cardigan doesn't retry them automatically.

A card waiting to be provisioned isn't reported, because it may be waiting on payment or on an order tag - see Gift card purchases.

Choosing what's reported

Each category can be turned on or off in the Cardigan Configuration page, under Notifications. Provisioning, activation and refund failures are reported by default. Redemption failures are not, since they're often the result of ordinary customer error - a mistyped number or a card with no balance left.

The redemption setting also covers store credit that couldn't be synchronised with your provider.

Batching

Notifications are batched and sent hourly rather than one email per failure, so a provider outage doesn't flood your inbox.

Each category is sent on its own schedule within the hour, so it's normal to receive separate emails for provisioning and redemption issues rather than one combined summary.

A card is only reported once. If a failure is retried and fails again, it won't generate a second notification. A card reported because it hadn't finished isn't reported again if it later fails.

Acting on a notification

Provisioning failures can usually be resolved from the admin - correcting the recipient's email address and retrying, or triggering provisioning manually. See Cards and records.

For a card that hasn't finished, get in touch and we'll check whether it reached your provider before anything is retried.

If failures are affecting many cards at once, it's usually a credential or connectivity problem rather than a data problem. Testing your profile's credentials is the quickest way to confirm - see Profiles.