Public Gift Card Shop – Sell Gift Cards Online
The gift card shop is a public page where guests buy gift cards themselves — on Christmas Eve at eleven at night, without anyone at the restaurant lifting a finger. The guest pays by card, and the recipient gets the card by email or SMS.
The shop is off by default. You turn it on when you want to.
Where do you turn it on?
Admin → Marketing → Loyalty → Gift Cards, at the bottom below the regular gift card settings.
If you run a chain, the same panel sits on the chain's Settings — then the card is valid at every restaurant in the chain.
The link you share
When the shop is on, the panel shows your link with a copy button:
| Shop | Link |
|---|---|
| One restaurant | /presentkort/your-restaurant |
| A whole chain | /kedja/your-chain/presentkort |
Put it on your website, in your Instagram bio and in your newsletter. The link only works once the shop is on — before that, guests see "The gift card shop is closed".
What the guest's purchase looks like
Four steps, no account:
- Amount — the guest picks one of your preset amounts or enters their own. How long the card is valid is shown here too.
- Recipient — name, email and/or mobile, a personal greeting and the sender's name. If the guest wants the card to arrive on a specific day, they pick the date here.
- Payment — card payment right on the page.
- Confirmation — a receipt of what was bought and where the card is headed.
The confirmation never shows the code. It only goes to the recipient by email or SMS. If someone were to guess an order id, they should not be able to read off a valid gift card.
What you configure
Amounts
| Setting | What it does |
|---|---|
| Preset amounts | The buttons the guest sees, e.g. 300 / 500 / 1,000 SEK |
| Minimum amount | Below this, purchase is not possible |
| Maximum amount | Above this, purchase is not possible |
| Validity | Number of months from purchase. Shown to the guest before buying and on the confirmation |
If you set a preset outside your own range, that button is hidden rather than rejected after the guest has already filled in the recipient.
Page text
- Headline — e.g. "Give an experience"
- Intro — a sentence or two about what the card covers
- Terms link — optional, appears at the bottom of the page
Leave the headline blank and it simply says "Gift card".
Delivery
| Option | What it gives the guest |
|---|---|
| Can enter the recipient's email address | |
| SMS | Can enter the recipient's mobile number — charged as a regular SMS |
| Scheduled delivery | Can pick a day for the card to be sent, e.g. on a birthday |
Turn email off and the field is not shown at all. At least one channel must be on for the guest to complete a purchase.
Your own branding
The page uses your restaurant's logo, colour and typeface automatically. A chain shop uses the chain's branding and also lists every restaurant where the card is valid — that is the whole selling point of a chain card.
Chain shop: name the issuer first
For a chain you must choose which restaurant issues the cards before the shop can be turned on. That restaurant carries the gift card liability in its books (account 2421) and receives the money. If the card is later redeemed at a sister restaurant, an intercompany entry is created automatically.
Pick no issuer and the switch stays locked, with the panel explaining why.
Accounting and the Swedish Tax Agency
Buying a gift card online is a distance contract. In practice that means three things for you:
- No control unit required. The purchase does not go through the POS and needs no cash register.
- No VAT at the point of sale. A gift card valid across the whole menu is a multi-purpose voucher — VAT is realised only when the guest redeems it and you know what they are buying.
- The amount is booked as a liability (account 2421) until the card is used.
All of this happens automatically. The purchase appears in your accounts and in the Z report's running totals just like any other sale.
Money first, card second
The card is never created before payment has gone through — that is a database guarantee, not just a rule in the code. If the guest abandons the payment, the started order is cleaned up automatically after a little over an hour.
If the guest closes the tab right after payment succeeds, the card is still issued and delivered. A background job every five minutes takes care of it.
Scheduled delivery
If the guest picks a future date, the card is sent at 09:00 that day. Until then it sits in the queue and is invisible to the recipient.
Common questions
Can I close the shop temporarily? Yes — flip the switch off. The link remains but shows "The gift card shop is closed". Cards already sold are unaffected.
What if the recipient never gets the SMS? The system retries automatically. You can see the card in the gift card list in admin and resend from there.
Can a guest buy several cards at once? No, one card per purchase. They repeat the purchase for the next recipient.
Does it cost extra? SMS delivery is charged as a regular SMS. The card payment carries the same fee as your other card sales.
See also:
- "Gift Cards – How They Work"
- "Sell Gift Card in POS"
- "Issue Gift Card (Admin)"
This feature is part of Vendion Loyalty.
Curious how it looks in practice? Read more about the product or book a short demo.
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