Advice on handling a store credit system with Orders/Payment API

Hi folks,

Awesome community here, and I just want to say as a software engineer with 15+ years of experience; working with Square’s APIs has been some of the least painful and awesome to use that I’ve ran into.

I’ve recently opened up a gaming store that sells tabletop games and card games, and decided to leverage my engineering experience to write my own POS system using Square’s APIs. A big part of the way these gaming stores operate is by taking trade-ins of product for store credit.

I currently am processing transactions by creating orders using the Order API with ad-hoc line items, and then completing the payments using the terminal or payment api, depending on if its a card or cash payment.

I’d like some advice on how best to integrate a store credit system like this into my workflow. I’m aware of a stored balance payment type, but have seen very little in the documentation about it, and am not sure if it’ll exactly fit what I’m trying to do here. Ideally it would also be able to support partial payments (example: $100 order, $75 of it in store credit, $25 on card)

The ideas I’ve thought of so far:

  • Apply the store credit as a Order level cash discount. I don’t love this, purely because it would show up as a discount in the Square reporting/accounting.
  • Somehow reduce the total price of the sale, like perhaps manually removing the amount of store credit spent on each item. This would report weirdly in square as well, though, I believe – there’d be a bunch of different prices for the same item, even if they actually sold for the full price
  • Use Square gift cards. I’m okay with doing this, but ideally as a last resort, as I’d much rather be able to use my own card system, transaction tracking, etc.

Super appreciate any advice here.

Thanks a ton,
Rob

So, the more I think about this, now that I’ve written it out, is it makes the most sense to just use square gift cards. They already support partial payments, I believe, and can do everything else I’m requesting here.

I think part of my reticience here was just that I had bought a card printer already :stuck_out_tongue:

Still interested in hearing if anyone has other thoughts, but for now I’ll be planning to use the gift card API and gift cards.

Looks like we can use the gift card api with our own custom gift cards. I thought it was only with Square provided ones. I guess this is what I get for not reading more :slight_smile:

Hope this spew of replies helps someone else in the future!

Hi Rob,

Out of curiosity, what card printer are you using?

Thanks!

We love the journey of the thought process through development. Thank you for sharing all of this with the community! Your definitely on the recommended path. :slightly_smiling_face:

1 Like

Hey! We use the evolis primacy 2. Its a bit of a pain though, in hindsight I might just suggest you use a card printing service, or Square’s own cards.

1 Like