Activate gift card without purchasing one

Questions
1

Hi there!

I’m attempting to work through using the gift card API without charging customers for getting the gift card.

The use case I have is using gift cards as a store credit system. Folks can come to our store and trade in items to the store for credit, and we’ll give them a card with balance on it that they can re-use in the future.

Creating the card is easy, and it looks like its fairly trivial to add balance via a ADJUST_INCREMENT GiftCardActivity (complementary type seems to work for this), but for actually activating the card it seems like you must issue an order with a line item.

I haven’t tried just doing a 0 cost order, is that the expected flow here? Or is there some other way for me to achieve this?

Thanks so much! Love the community here :slight_smile:

2

You can activate a gift card without adding an order. You’ll want to follow our Create and Activate a Gift Card When Using a Custom Processing System guide to activate a gift card without using the Payments API or Orders API. :slightly_smiling_face:

3

Thanks Bryan! I think I misunderstood parts of that guide and missed this. Always appreciate the guidance!