Providers
SVS
Information about working with Cardigan's SVS (Stored Value Solutions) integration.
Overview
SVS is available as a default provider option immediately on Cardigan installation.
SVS supports balance checks, redemption using a true authorize-and-capture flow where funds are held against the card during checkout and only captured once the order is placed, and activation of physical card stock at the point of sale.
Selling and redeeming in store
SVS certifies the point of sale channel separately and expects a different set of transactions there, so a store selling in both channels runs a second profile alongside this one. See SVS Point of Sale.
Digital provisioning not supported
Cardigan can't issue new digital gift cards on SVS, so an SVS profile can't be used to sell digital cards through your online store or Shopify POS.
Selling and activating physical card stock through Shopify POS is supported - see Activating physical cards. The distinction is that activation loads a card number that SVS has already issued, rather than creating a new card.
Setup
After installation, navigate to the "Profiles" section in your Cardigan settings and add a new "SVS" gift card provider.
Credentials
Your SVS API credentials will be provided to you by your account manager at SVS, if you don't already have them. You'll be issued a distinct set of credentials for each of the Certification and Production environments.
All four of the values Cardigan needs - user ID, password, auth ID and root key - are supplied together, so if you've only received some of them it's worth going back to your account manager before you start.
Certification comes before production access
Before SVS will approve Cardigan for production use, you'll need to work through a certification script that SVS provides against the Certification environment. Your production credentials follow once that's signed off, so it's worth starting the conversation with your account manager early.
This is currently done for each merchant individually rather than once for Cardigan as a whole. We hope to move to a single certification covering all Cardigan merchants in future, which would remove this step.
API Endpoint
The endpoint to connect to. Two options are available:
- Certification (
svc-cert.storedvalue.com): use this for your staging environment and while validating your setup; - Production (
svc.storedvalue.com): use this once everything has been confirmed working.
Cardigan sets the matching authentication endpoint for you when you choose an API endpoint, so there's nothing extra to configure.
User ID
Your SVS API user ID.
Password
Your SVS API password.
Auth ID
The authentication identifier supplied alongside your API credentials.
Root key
The root key used to sign requests to SVS.
Configuration options
Merchant ID
Your SVS merchant identifier.
Store number
The store number to send with requests. This identifies the originating store in SVS reporting.
Currency
The currency that cards issued against this profile are denominated in.
Refund behaviour
Select the desired behaviour when a refund is triggered against a gift card redemption transaction (either manually from the Shopify admin or via the Shopify API). Options include:
- Take no action, in which case Cardigan will ignore the refund;
- Issue new, in which case Cardigan will provision a new digital gift card for the refunded amount. Note that the new digital gift card will be issued back to the customer that placed the order being refunded -- this will likely be a different customer to the original purchaser;
- Refund to original, in which case Cardigan will return the funds to the original gift card used to pay for the order.
"Issue new" provisions a new digital gift card, so it isn't a usable option on SVS - we recommend either taking no action or refunding to the original card.
Usage
Once the SVS profile is set up and configured, you can add Cardigan's front end widgets to your store and test flows like balance lookups and redemptions.
SVS provides a certification script as part of the certification process described above, and this includes the test card numbers to work through. Those numbers only work against the Certification environment - they won't resolve once a profile is pointed at Production.
You can't generate your own card numbers to test with on SVS, since Cardigan doesn't issue digital cards on this provider and activation works against numbers SVS has already issued. Have a few valid real card numbers ready before you start testing against Production.