Integration

The use of gift cards and gift certificates as an online payment method brings additional complexities. Customers can combine gift cards with other payment sources, such as another gift card or iDEAL payment, providing them with extra payment options. The Payment Engine must check at the order level if full payment has been received, covering scenarios such as partial payments, duplicate payments, and uncompleted payments with an unknown status.

Work Flow

A gift card payment is initiated by sending a gift card request to a BPE transaction gateway. The gateway processes the request and sends a response to the merchant. Additionally, a transaction push is sent to the merchant, containing the current status of the transaction.

Testing

For convenience, a test gift card is available that never expires or becomes fully consumed. Use the following test gift card (the gift card code length is 19 digits, consisting of 18 zeroes and a single one at the end):

Test Gift Card Code: 0000000000000000001

Since you have to enter the pin of a gift card in the normal gift card payment flow, the entered pin is taken as being the value of this test gift card (in cents). This allows you to test partial payments and full consumption of a gift card. To test a partial payment, enter a gift card pin value that is less than the requested payment amount in cents. This will start the partial payment flow.

Partial Payments

A payment done with a gift card can result in a partial payment. If the gift card does not contain enough money to fully pay for the requested amount, the gift card will be fully consumed, and the customer will be asked to pay the remainder of the open amount. On gateways where the customer has been sent along, the payment engine will handle this automatically. On gateways where the payment flow is handled by the merchant's website, the merchant will need to handle this.

Service Codes and Actions

Each gift card has its own service code. You can find them in this list of services. If you wish to use a gift card that's not in the current selection, you can submit it (up to 3 max) to [email protected]. Once configured, you will be able to use it by providing the service code customgiftcard, customgiftcard2, or customgiftcard3 (you will be notified of the right service code).

The Gift Card service supports the following actions:

• Pay: Perform a payment with a gift card.
• Refund: Perform a refund on an earlier gift card payment.

Partial Refunds

Partial refunds are only possible in specific scenarios:

1. The gift card must be an Intersolve gift card.
2. Intersolve needs to configure your gift cards to support partial refunds. This is not enabled by default and must be requested by the merchant.

Additionally, two extra service parameters are required: LastName and Email. These parameters can be supplied either on the initial transaction or on the actual refund. The email will then be used by Intersolve to email the customer their card details and balance.