Activating physical cards

The Sell physical gift card tile lets staff sell a physical gift card from stock held in store, activating the card with your gift card provider as part of the sale.

The staff workflow

1. Staff tap the tile on the POS home screen.
2. They capture the card number from the physical card, either by scanning it with the POS device's barcode scanner, scanning it with the device camera, or typing it in.
3. Cardigan looks the card up with your provider and confirms it hasn't already been activated.
4. Staff choose the card value from the list of variants you've made available, or enter a custom value if you allow it.
5. They tap Add to cart, and the card is added to the POS cart.
6. The sale is completed through the normal POS payment flow, and the card is activated.

Card capture

If the POS device has a camera available, the card number field offers a Scan with camera action. Hardware barcode scanners paired with the device are picked up automatically - scanning a card at any point takes staff straight to the lookup screen with the number filled in.

Already-activated cards

If the card has already been activated, staff are told so and the sale can't proceed. This prevents the same card being sold and loaded twice, which would otherwise be difficult to unpick with your provider.

When the card is activated

Adding the card to the cart doesn't activate it. Activation happens with your gift card provider once the order is paid.

If activation fails - for example because the card number couldn't be read correctly - the failure is recorded and, if you've set up notifications, the nominated recipients are emailed. You can review activation records in the admin under Activated cards.

Configuration

The following options appear in the Cardigan Configuration page once POS is enabled for your store.

Which variants can be sold

Under Physical gift cards (POS), select the product variants you want available to staff. Only these variants appear in the tile.

These are configured separately from both your online store matching and your POS digital card matching.

Allow custom values

Enabling Allow custom values lets staff load an arbitrary amount onto the card rather than picking from your predefined denominations.

Custom value cards are added to the cart as a custom sale rather than as a product variant.

Custom value SKU property

When custom values are allowed, this is the value Cardigan sets as the sku property on the custom sale line item, identifying it as a physical gift card.

Full or discounted value

Determines the value the card is activated for when a discount has been applied to the sale:

• Use full value when activating physical cards activates the card for its face value, regardless of what the customer paid. This is the default.
• Use discounted value when activating physical cards activates the card for the amount actually paid.

Selling more than one card in a sale

Each gift card variant can only be added to the POS cart once per sale, since the card number is attached to that specific line item. Custom value cards aren't subject to this and are added as separate numbered line items.

To sell several physical cards of the same denomination, staff can either use custom values or complete separate transactions.