A gift card is the only product you sell that gets paid for before it is made. The buyer pays today, the holder visits later, and often brings someone with them. For a small café, salon or spa with a loyal base, that is cash now and a new customer later, with no advertising spend in between. Here is how gift cards work in Fuze Store and how to run them without surprises.
Two things a gift card does for you
Prepaid revenue. Money arrives before the cost of serving it. A card bought in December for a January visit is January stock paid for in December. A half-spent card is a reason to come back for the rest.
A referral you did not have to ask for. Nobody buys a gift card for themselves. Every card sold is a regular introducing you to someone who may never have walked in. They arrive already paid, which makes a first visit easy, and customers often spend more than the card's value once they are there.
The Gift Cards add-on tracks balances and redemptions for you. You can offer physical cards, digital codes, or both; the register only cares about the code.
Creating a card
Open the menu, choose Gift Cards, and press New Gift Card. Each card has six fields:
- Enable — the card is active and can be used.
- Amount — the value loaded onto it.
- Max Usage — how many times it can be redeemed. Leave it at 0 for unlimited; set 1 for a single-use voucher.
- Code — the unique code, unique within your store. This is what the customer presents.
- Description — optional, for example "Birthday gift".
- Expires At — optional. Leave it blank for a card that never expires.
Press Save and the card is ready to sell or hand over. Use clear codes that staff and customers recognise, and double-check the value and code before saving. A card is cheap to create and awkward to explain, so get it right the first time.
A few ways to use the fields. A ₱500 card with Max Usage at 0 behaves like store credit the holder can spend across visits. A ₱200 card with Max Usage at 1 is a one-time voucher for a promo. A seasonal card with an expiry date retires itself on the day you set.
Taking payment with a card
At the register, build the order as usual. Then open Menu → Gift Cards, type the code into Gift Code, and tap Check. The card's balance and status appear and Apply becomes available. Tap it, review the total, and complete the sale. If the card does not cover everything, take the rest with any other payment method. You can also use more than one card on a single order.
The remaining balance shows on the register screen. Printed receipts do not itemize gift-card usage yet, so tell the customer their balance at the counter, or look it up on the card's record later.
The rules that keep balances honest
These are worth putting on a note by the register:
- Check before you apply. Once a card is applied it cannot be taken back off the order. If you pick the wrong card, cancel and rebuild the order; cancelling returns the amount to the card.
- A card only covers what is still owed. On an order with a payment already taken, the card covers the remainder. A fully paid order does not take a gift card.
- If the order gets cheaper, the card gets its money back. Remove a delivery fee or void an item after the card is applied and the card is credited with what the order no longer needs.
- Refunds go back to the card. A refund on a closed order returns the card's part to the card. See Completing a Refund.
- Two registers, one card. If the card was just used on another register, the order is not saved and the card is taken off. Apply it again to use what is left.
- Gift card spend earns loyalty points. If you also run the Loyalty add-on, the part of a sale paid by gift card earns points, the same as cash.
Editing and retiring cards
You can edit a card at any time: the code, the expiry, the description, or the Enable toggle. Editing never changes the remaining balance or the usage count, so it is safe to fix a typo on a card a customer has already spent from. Changing Amount updates the card's face value for reporting; it does not top the card back up.
To take a card out of circulation, turn Enable off. Deleting is permanent and cannot be undone, though the records are preserved: past sales, redemptions and reports still show the card as it was at the time of use. If you are unsure, disable it instead.
A simple way to run it
- Pick two or three denominations and create a code for each card you sell. A code pattern, for example GC-0501, keeps the list readable.
- Decide the expiry policy once. Blank for cards that never expire, a date for seasonal promos. Write it on the card.
- Train the register script: build the order, Check the code, Apply, say the remaining balance out loud.
- Review the list monthly. Disable cards that should be retired and watch which ones actually get redeemed. Tracking which cards perform best tells you what the next promotion should be.
- Promote them where regulars already are: a sign at the counter and a line in your messaging group before the holidays.
The full walkthroughs are in the Gift Card Overview, How to Create a Gift Card and How to Apply a Gift Card to an Order. Fuze Store is free to start, and gift cards switch on as an add-on when you are ready to sell your first one.