How to Create & Sell Digital & Physical Gift Cards

How to manage and sell digital and physical gift cards on your website

Updated over a week ago

Step 1 - Enable Your Store

Before making your Gift Cards Page available online, you'll need to fill out a few pieces of information and optionally connect a payment processor before you can successfully make your Gift Cards page visible.

Step 2 - Create Gift Cards

  1. Click the "Store" tab from the left side menu, then hover over the store icon and select "Gift Cards"

2. On the "Settings" tab, switch "On" the type of gift card you want to sell.

  • Digital Gift Cards - the digital gift card will be sent through email. You can also attach a reward or "bonus" whenever someone purchases a digital gift card as an incentive or purchases gift cards for themselves or for others. Click here to learn more about how to apply a bonus on a digital gift card.

  • Physical Gift Cards - the physical gift card can be mailed or picked up from your location

3. Enter the gift card details

  • Design
    Sociavore has default card designs but if you have your own gift card design, just click the [upload button] and upload your own image.

    Images should be resized to fit the ideal ratio multiples of 320x200 (640x400, 1280x800, etc.). You can use an image optimizer app like Cloudinary to resize graphics.

  • Headline Message

  • Notes & Instructions

  • Terms & Conditions

4. Click "Add New Card" if you don’t have a card yet or if you want to have a new card (you can add multiple gift cards).

  • Enter the Gift Card title and price.

  • Optionally (only for digital gift cards), you can add a bonus promotion. Just select “Add bonus promotion” and enter the bonus amount and expiry date.

  • Click "Save."


Some examples you can use for notes & instructions:

  • Physical gift cards can be used in person only.

  • You can use digital gift cards for dine-in and online purchases.


Step 3 - Make the Gift Cards Available on the Website

1. Click the "Website" tab from the left side menu, then click "Pages".

2. Click the "Add a Page" button, then select "Gift Cards Page" from the pop-up window

3. Give your Gift Cards Page a name. 

The page name will appear as a text link from the navigation menu.


4. Finally, toggle the page to 'Visible' to make it available on your website's navigation menu.

Enable or Disable Gift Card Redemptions at Checkout Page

Customers can redeem digital gift cards when they buy items from the website.

To disable it, go to the Ecommerce Dashboard > Checkout Tab and turn the switch ON to hide the payment option for gift cards on the checkout page.


To do a test purchase, check out this article on How to Do a Test Purchase Using a Discount Code.


What happens when a customer buys a gift card?

  1. When customers click the Gift Cards Page from your website's navigation menu, they will be asked "Who is the gift card for?"

2. Depending on the type of gift cards you've set up in your Sociavore account, the customer may select a Digital or a Physical gift card type.

3. If you’ve uploaded your own design, it will be displayed above the gift card options. If you’ve uploaded more than one design, there will be an option to select a gift card design.

4. Once a Gift Card is purchased, you can view and manage redemptions made through the card. You can manually add redemptions, manually change the balance of the gift card, add a note, resend the card to the recipient, or view the gift card transaction history.

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