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
