We’re excited to announce the latest improvement to the Customer Tracking functionality of ShopKeep: Integrated Gift Cards

We know that there’s nothing more important to the success of your small business than creating happy, satisfied customers that come back to your store again and again. So, we’ve now made it possible to issue, accept, and redeem gift cards right from the ShopKeep app. Coming hot on the heels of our Custom Email Receipts release, we hope this will help more small business owners connect with their customers and drive additional revenue.

In order to get set up with Gift Cards, you’ll need to call one of our Point of Sale Specialists on 800-820-9814.  They’ll enable the relevant functionality in your app, as well as get you hooked up with a package of cards that are right for your business.

We’ve been building out this functionality for a little while and we’ve worked to make sure our solution really works from front to back.  To that end, we recently introduced liability tracking to your BackOffice so not only can you run a gift card program, but everything will be accounted for properly also.  Allow us to explain:

If you ever used a windows-based pos system you would know that when you sell a gift card it shows up as a sale in your reporting. But a gift card isn’t a sale, you’re essentially exchanging a gift card for cash and creating a liability because in order for you to make a sale a customer has to come back with that gift card to spend that money. So you don’t want it to show up in your sales until they actually use the gift card as a tender to make that sale. ShopKeep has built the functionality to make sure that you can understand what your liabilities are outstanding and when you sell a gift card it doesn’t show up as sales. That is something very new for the retail space and instead of having these workarounds that have existed in the past, it’s a much better way of tracking gift cards in your reporting.

Once we had this groundwork in place, we were able to move forward and build out the front facing – and really exciting – part of this product – gift card integration.

Here’s the product manager that led the release, Peter Knox to share a little more:

You can find a step by step guide to ShopKeep’s Integrated Gift Card solution on our help site. And if you’re still not convinced that Gift Cards are right for you, we’ve listed some of the core benefits of Gift Cards in black and white below.

The Benefits of Signing Up For Gift Cards

1. The Gift Card Market is Huge: Us Spending gift cards alone is estimated at $118 billion dollars.

2. If you issue someone a gift card, it essentially becomes a mobile advertisement for your business that a customer will see every single time they open their wallet. As the old Madison Avenue slogan goes ‘Repetition is Advertising, Repetition is Advertising’.

3. Selling gift cards gives you that most valued of possessions in the world of small business: cash upfront. Selling gift cards can be a great way to boost operating capital.

4. Three quarters of gift cards users spend 60% more than the value of the card. So, no only are you getting cash upfront but you are incentivizing your customers to come back and spend more!

Paul Nugent

Paul Nugent

Paul Nugent is a small business advocate who uses his background in the startup space, along with his POS system expertise, to allow small business owners to make informed decisions within their specific budgets.