Shopify: Gift Cards Integration
Metorik integrates deeply with Shopify's native gift card functionality, which as of 2020 is available on all Shopify plans. Since Metorik is a reporting and segmenting tool, it's important to understand how the sale and usage of gift cards impacts your reports and other features in Metorik.
In this article
Summary
Shopify does not include gift card sales in their sales reports - more on this here. As such, we've decided to follow their lead and are also not including gift card purchases in our sales reports until they are redeemed.
There are a number of reasons for taking this approach, which we will talk about below, but first some more information about how gift card issuing, sales, and uses impact Metorik.
When you issue a gift card manually from your Shopify admin:
It isn't included as a sale in any report.
When you sell a gift card:
It isn't included as a sale in the revenue report, orders, report, dashboard totals.
It isn't included as part of a customer's total spend.
It is included in the products report under the gift card product's sales - view all gift card products here.
When a customer uses a gift card to purchase something from your store:
It is included in sales reports. The full value of the item is claimed as sales. For example, a $20 t-shirt with $5 of that purchase paid for by a gift card will show up as $20 in sales.
Gift card sales
When a gift card is sold, this is what the order for it will look like in Metorik:
The order total will be $0, but we'll clearly show the amount of gift cards purchased in the order - $25.
On the orders page, you'll also be able to view the amount of gift cards purchased in the order:
If we were to view the sales on that day (September 21) in the orders report, this $25 sale of a gift card will not be included.
However, if we were to view the products report or variations report, we would see the sale for the gift card there:
As it's important to know how many gift cards you are selling and how much advanced sales you are doing. You can also view a gift card's product page to view the gift card sale data in detail:
When viewing the profile of the customer who purchased a gift card in Metorik, their total spend will be $0 but their gift cards purchased will be $25:
Segmenting
Using Metorik's segmenting system, you can segment gift card sale data with ease.
On the orders page, you can segment orders based off the value of gift cards purchased and the number of gift cards in orders:
Similarly on the customers page, you can segment based off the total value of gift cards a customer has purchased and the total number of gift cards a customer has purchased:
On the products page and variations page, you can segment to find gift card products using the fulfillment service filter:
Gift card usage/redemption
When a gift card is used to pay for an order, Shopify and Metorik will treat it as just another payment method. So instead of someone paying for an order by credit card, they're paying for it with their gift card.
For example, here's an order that was paid for entirely with a gift card:
As you can see, even though a gift card was used, the order total is still the entire $43. We can also see that a gift card was used, including a link to the gift card itself in Shopify.
When we look at the orders report for September 21st, this will count as a sale of $43.
When we look at the customer profile of the customer who used the gift card, $43 will count towards their total spend.
Partial gift card payments
If a customer has a gift card for $50, but they make an order for $150, Shopify will allow them to pay for the order with both a gift card and a regular payment method like a credit card.
The sale will still count as $150 in Metorik.
As an order can only have one 'payment method' in Metorik, we'll store the 'regular payment method' (eg. the credit card) in the order details. You'll still be able to view if a gift card was used when viewing the single order in Metorik in the order details:
Segmenting
On the orders page, you can segment to find orders that used a gift card for either full or partial payment:
You can also segment here to find orders that used a certain gift card ID and by a gift card's last 4 characters:
This data (gift card ID and gift card last characters) can be included in order exports by using the 'include meta' setting and selecting the above fields.
Other things to keep in mind
When viewing product sales, keep in mind that Metorik includes both the sale of gift cards and the usage of them there. So if you were to add up the total sales numbers from all products there, it would be greater than the actual amount of sales you did in the orders report.
If you were to refund the sale of a gift card, it can result in a 'net loss' on the order when we take the sale amount ($0) but deduct the refund.
As such, we'd recommend cancelling orders that involve the sale and refund of a gift card, so the order does not show in your reports to begin with.
If you run a multi-currency store, you may notice some inconsistencies due to how Shopify converts and rounds totals for gift card sales.
When it comes to carts, a cart's total right now includes gift cards in the cart. Since you can use Metorik Engage to email customers about their abandoned carts, it's important that we display the correct total as to not confuse customers.
Why not count the sale of gift cards?
When building our integration with Shopify's gift card features, we had to decide if we'd count the sale of gift cards in reports, or the usage of gift cards in report.
Ultimately we decided on counting the usage, as this is how Shopify does it, but there are also some other reasons.
If you count the sale of gift cards as part of your reports, it introduces a lot of issues:
What do we set the 'total' of orders where gift cards are used?
How do you handle refunds of orders where a gift card is used (as Shopify allows you to refund orders back to the gift card)?
How do you count the correct amount of sales tax collected from orders when the gift cards are used?
When do you recognise COGS/profit on an order if a gift card is used to pay for it?
How do we correctly segment customers based off their total spend, if they've used gift cards for purchases?
An added benefit of the approach we've taken is that you're still able to view gift card sales in a period on the product/variation level, so you aren't missing out of any data.
Costs and profit handling
When using Metorik's costs and profit system, we advise against setting a cost on gift cards. As Metorik is not counting the sale of the gift card, but rather the usage of it and the cost of the products bought with it, it is important that a gift card's cost is $0. Otherwise your profit reports in Metorik would have the cost inflated by the gift card's cost.
If you technically do incur an additional cost with gift cards (eg. printing physical ones), you may want to add a cost to them but it's still best to keep this at $0 for more consistent reports and easier reconciliation.
More information
As our integration with Shopify is still quite new, we're open to your feedback and thoughts here as we work out the details. If you have any questions about our gift cards integration and how gift card sales and uses are counted in reports, please let us know and we'd love to help.