Gift Card System

Gift cards

Gift Cards also known as “gift coupons” or “gift certificates” are a mechanism that allows you to sell tokens that can later be used to pay for tickets. 

Gift cards, are very different feature than vouchers. The difference is: 

• Vouchers can be used to give a discount. When a voucher is used, the price of a ticket is reduced by the configured discount and sold at a lower price. They therefore reduce both revenue as well as taxes. Vouchers are always specific to a certain product in an order. Vouchers are usually not sold but given out as part of a marketing campaign or to specific groups of people. Vouchers are bound to a specific event. 

• Gift cards are not a discount, but rather a means of payment. If you buy a $20 ticket with a $10 gift card, it is still a $20 ticket and will still count towards your revenue with $20. Gift cards are usually bought for the money that they are worth. Gift cards can be used across events (and even organizers). 

Selling gift cards 

Selling gift cards works like selling every other type of product: Create a new product, then head to “Additional settings” and select the option “This product is a gift card”. Whenever someone buys this product and pays for it, a new gift card will be created. 

In this case, the gift card code corresponds to the “ticket secret” in the PDF ticket. Therefore, if selling gift cards, you can use ticket downloads just as with normal tickets and use our ticket editor to create beautiful gift certificates people can give to their loved ones.

 Of course, you can use the flexible options to modify your product. For example, you can configure that the customer can freely choose the price of the gift card.

Accepting gift cards 

All your events have the payment provider “Gift card” enabled by default, but it will only show up in the ticket shop once the very first gift card has been issued on your organizer account. Of course, you can turn off gift card payments if you do not want them for a specific event.

If gift card payments are enabled, buyers will be able to select “Gift card” as a payment method during checkout. If a gift card with a value less than the order total is used, the buyer will be asked to select a second payment method for the remaining payment. If a gift card with a value greater than the order total is used, the surplus amount remains on the gift card and can be used in a different purchase. 

It is possible to accept gift cards across organizer accounts. To do so, you need to have access to both organizer accounts. Then, you will see a configuration section at the bottom of the “Gift cards” page of your organizer settings where you can specify which gift cards should be accepted.

Manually issuing or using gift cards 

Of course, you can also issue or redeem gift cards manually through our backend using the “Gift cards” menu item in your organizer profile or using our API. These gift cards will be tracked by loop1, but do not correspond to any purchase within loop1. You will therefore need to account for them in your books separately.