# Question about gift card activity and buyer\_payment\_instrument\_ids

**URL:** <https://developer.squareup.com/forums/t/question-about-gift-card-activity-and-buyer-payment-instrument-ids/8063>\
**Category:** Questions\
**Tags:** gift-cards-api\
**Created:** [December 29, 2022, 8:19pm UTC](https://developer.squareup.com/forums/t/question-about-gift-card-activity-and-buyer-payment-instrument-ids/8063 "2022-12-29T20:19:44Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 4\
**Page:** 1

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**Author:** ![scottbrainbrew](https://sea1.discourse-cdn.com/square/forums/user_avatar/developer.squareup.com/scottbrainbrew/32/1564_2.png) [@scottbrainbrew](https://developer.squareup.com/forums/u/scottbrainbrew)\
**Post date:** [December 29, 2022, 8:19pm UTC](https://developer.squareup.com/forums/t/question-about-gift-card-activity-and-buyer-payment-instrument-ids/8063/1 "2022-12-29T20:19:44Z")

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I am thinking that I will have to write a script to use the API to migrate some digital gift cards we have in our wordpress/woocommerce because they have alphanumeric numbers and the customer support import option will only import numeric gift cards.

Since these have already been purchased in our Woocommerce/wordpress previously, I don’t want to create an order for them…

So my current thinking is to create gift card, then activate using the  
buyer\_payment\_instrument\_ids: ‘cash’

My question since I’d prefer not test this in production - will this show up in reporting as sales income? or does it leave it out of there since it’s considered an external sale?

Any other gotchas I should be on the lookout for?

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**Author:** ![Bryan-Square](https://sea1.discourse-cdn.com/square/forums/user_avatar/developer.squareup.com/bryan-square/32/38_2.png) [@Bryan-Square](https://developer.squareup.com/forums/u/Bryan-Square)\
**Post date:** [December 29, 2022, 8:55pm UTC](https://developer.squareup.com/forums/t/question-about-gift-card-activity-and-buyer-payment-instrument-ids/8063/2 "2022-12-29T20:55:38Z")

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It wouldn’t show up in any of the sales reports since it’s not a `payment_id` that was used to make the purchase. 🙂

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<div class="post-metadata">

**Author:** ![scottbrainbrew](https://sea1.discourse-cdn.com/square/forums/user_avatar/developer.squareup.com/scottbrainbrew/32/1564_2.png) [@scottbrainbrew](https://developer.squareup.com/forums/u/scottbrainbrew)\
**Post date:** [December 29, 2022, 11:17pm UTC](https://developer.squareup.com/forums/t/question-about-gift-card-activity-and-buyer-payment-instrument-ids/8063/3 "2022-12-29T23:17:30Z")

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If I am running a loop to create and then activate about 800 gift cards (so 1600 api calls) is there a rate limiting I would run into in sandbox and production?

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**Author:** ![Bryan-Square](https://sea1.discourse-cdn.com/square/forums/user_avatar/developer.squareup.com/bryan-square/32/38_2.png) [@Bryan-Square](https://developer.squareup.com/forums/u/Bryan-Square)\
**Post date:** [December 29, 2022, 11:30pm UTC](https://developer.squareup.com/forums/t/question-about-gift-card-activity-and-buyer-payment-instrument-ids/8063/4 "2022-12-29T23:30:28Z")

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Yes, all of our endpoints have rate limits but we don’t document the limits. We encourage you to handle the limit gracefully by building a retry mechanism. This mechanism should have an exponential backoff schedule to reduce requests when volume is necessary. Also some randomness wouldn’t hurt to avoid a [thundering herd effect](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thundering_herd_problem). 🙂