Whether you’re thinking about starting to offer gift cards for your company or your team has been offering them for years, there’s always room for improvement. Throughout various reports, at least 50% of companies (and up to 70 or 80%) are strictly using physical cards. This metric is very hard to track due to the segmentation of various departments in companies and the cash-like nature of gift cards. This is not a good practice in our digital age where a decent portion of the population does not even want to go outside.
Many companies are making a switch to vendors (or building internally) systems that can easily handle the front end UI/UX selection process of gift cards and then use a supplied API from an external vendor to manage the fulfillment of sending out a digital code via text or email (almost always email). This means that your users have to go through 3 or so systems and copy and paste the code into an external system each time they receive a gift card.
This is not a streamlined process. If you’re running a web page or an app where you would like to implement gift cards, you want your own company logo instead of Gmail’s right next to that e-gift card.
What we’ve created at StoreCash as a streamlined solution is creating a wallet application to easily keep track of all the various gift cards you have received and allows your user a simple way to manage. Say for example, If one of your employees earns a $50 sales spiff on 10 different occasions they would be able to choose, redeem, and even utilize the funds all from the same application. They are not scrounging through 5K unread emails in their Gmail Inbox looking for the 8, or 9, or 10 codes they think they’ve redeemed. This is what applications are supposed to look like and how they’re supposed to function.
When we started to implement our wallet application this obviously led us to other functionalities that were unthinkable for our company before. Since we had an area where we could store the user balances and the chosen gift cards, it allowed us for additional abilities like allowing a contactless/scannable payment if they wanted to use the gift card in store.
The main point that this comes back around to is obviously taking any best practices that you can learn from the industry and do what is best for your unique company. We’ve worked hard to create our standalone web/app based platforms, API’s, and allow for custom solutions to provide the best possible solution for you and your team. When it comes to Gift cards for your platform, we treat our partnerships like an extension of our family and understand that the technical, financial, and business relationships need to be mutually beneficial for both teams.