SVS Point of Sale

Information about working with Cardigan's SVS Point of Sale integration, for selling and redeeming SVS gift cards through Shopify POS.

Overview

SVS Point of Sale is available as a default provider option immediately on Cardigan installation.

SVS treats the point of sale channel as a separate integration to the one used by your online store, with a different set of transactions and its own certification. Rather than holding funds against a card during checkout and capturing them afterwards, an in-store redemption is a single transaction, and card details are submitted with the security value printed on or issued with the card.

That means a store selling in both channels runs two profiles: an SVS profile for the online store, and an SVS Point of Sale profile for the till. Cardigan routes each request to the right one based on the channel it came from.

SVS Point of Sale supports:

• selling and activating physical card stock at the till;
• balance checks;
• redemption;
• refunding a redemption back to the original card.

Setup

After installation, navigate to the "Profiles" section in your Cardigan settings and add a new "SVS Point of Sale" gift card provider.

Channel types

Set the profile's channel types to Point of Sale, and make sure your online SVS profile is set to Online. This is what tells Cardigan which profile to use for a request.

Credentials

The credentials are the same set you use for the online SVS provider - user ID, password, auth ID and root key - and you can use the same values on both profiles. They're supplied by your account manager at SVS, with a distinct set for each of the Certification and Production environments.

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.

A profile carries a single store number, so if SVS reporting needs to distinguish your individual stores, talk to us about your requirements.

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).

We recommend refund to original, which returns the funds to the card the customer paid with. "Issue new" provisions a new digital gift card, so it isn't a usable option on SVS, and "take no action" leaves the customer without their funds.

Card configuration at SVS

Ask your SVS account manager to confirm that your card range is configured for full tender rather than split tender.

The difference matters at the till. With full tender, trying to redeem more than a card holds is declined outright, and your staff can take the remainder on another payment method. With split tender, SVS approves whatever the card can cover - but by that point Shopify has already taken the payment for the full amount, so the shortfall can't be collected. Cardigan detects a partial approval and fails the redemption rather than under-collecting, but it's far better to have the range configured correctly from the start.

Usage

Once the profile is set up, the Cardigan POS tiles work as they do for other providers - see Point of Sale for adding them to your smart grid.

Selling a card

Staff scan or key a physical card in the "Add physical gift card" tile, set the amount, and complete the sale. Cardigan loads the value onto the card once the order is paid. Each card can only be sold once - SVS requires the initial load to be a card's first transaction - so a card that's already been sold will be rejected.

Balance checks and redemption

Staff look a card up in the "Redeem gift card" tile, either by scanning it or keying its number.

Scanned cards don't need a PIN. The scanned barcode carries the card's security value, so leave the PIN field empty. It's only needed for older magnetic stripe cards that have to be keyed in by hand, because Shopify POS can't pass magnetic stripe data to apps.

Topping up a card

Cardigan supports SVS top-ups at the API level, but there's no till flow for it yet. Get in touch if adding value to an existing card in store is something you need.

Testing

SVS provides test card numbers as part of the point of sale certification script. 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, since Cardigan doesn't issue digital cards on SVS and selling a card works against numbers SVS has already issued. Have a few valid real cards to hand before you start testing against Production, and note that selling one uses up its first transaction.