A few caveats you should consider before continuing..
BusinessMind POS Gift Cards (and eGift Cards) are designed to work only with the BusinessMind POS, while, Shopify's own online gift card feature is designed to work only with Shopify's E-commerce shopping cart.
It is important to understand these limitations and provide a clear explanation to your customers about how and where the different kinds of gift cards you sell online can be used.
BusinessMind POS Gift cards can't be used to pay for purchases in the e-commerce shopping cart, even if the BusinessMind Gift Card was purchased online.
Shopify Gift Cards can not be used to pay for purchases at your in-store BusinessMind point of sale.
Here at DCIT we have been developing ways to enhance our Shopify integration to include the ability to make BusinessMind POS gift cards useable for payment in the online shopping cart. It does seem possible to make this work, however, Shopify only provides the neccessary programming APIs for it for customers who have upgraded their Shopify accounts to the "Plus" level. We hope to be able to roll out this feature in the future, but as it currently stands, you would need to boost your Shopify account level to Shopify Plus in order to be able to take advantage of it.
That said, lets move on with instructions for the process of selling your BusinessMind POS gift cards online.
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The below information will guide you on how to setup gift cards that can be sold through online. These can then be used for an in-store purchases at a later date.
These can not be used for online purchases as explained above.
The first step to this process is to add MODEL place holders into BusinessMind to represent your gift cards so that they are available as a product on Shopify. You will do this for each gift card value you wish to sell.
To add a model click on the plus icon and choose the New Model option.
We recommend the following when creating these placeholder gift card models.
Set the supplier to your company name.
Set the model to something easily searchable like 100DollarOnlineGiftCard
Set an image that you want to be displayed on Shopify. We recommend you make a digital graphic of your physical gift card. That graphic should NOT include a real gift card number.
Check the display on Web option.
Be sure to Check the option to Display on Zero.
Set your Shopify Title, Description, Tags, and Tracking per your needs.
Set the Online Price to be the value of the gift card you are selling.
Set the Expected Price to be the value of the gift card you are selling.
We recommend your description notes that this is to purchase a physical gift card that will be mailed to the purchaser and can only be utilized in-store.
Be sure to create one model for each value gift card you are selling. As per the below screen shot, you will see that we created a model for each price value we want to sell on shopify.
When you receive an order from Shopify indicating that one of these were sold, you will need to process a physical gift card in BusinessMind and then ship it to the customer. It is very important to understand that you are not invoicing/selling the placeholder Models you created. You will be adding value to an actual physical gift card using the payment your customer submitted via your shopping cart and shipping that physical card to the customer.
From the Point of Sale select the customer info if needed (this is optional)
Click the Gift Card button
Here you can scan the barcode found on the physical gift card you are creating/replenishing or you can type this info in directly (if typing press the tab key to advance once the 16 digit code is filled in). Once scanned or typed in you will be taken to the value assignment screen.
Utilize the helpful fill amount buttons or manually type the amount to add to the gift cards. Be sure the amount selected matches the amount purchased via the shopping cart. This will now add the Gift Card to the transaction.
Click the Charge button to bring up the payment processor and record the payment you received via the shopping cart.
The Gift Card now has the value assigned to it.
Ship this gift card to the purchaser.
They can then use this physical gift card for in-store purchases, or gift it for others to use.