Overview

A gift card is a prepaid payment card used for purchases at participating restaurants, stores, or online retailers, available in various denominations. Depending on the issuer’s terms, you can redeem these cards for services, merchandise, or cash.

Clover native gift cards managed through the Fiserv payment gateway, are integrated into the Clover point of sale (POS) system for seamless transactions. Physical gift cards have a 4-8 digit security card value (SCV), while virtual gift cards use a promo code.

A purchased gift card is activated before a customer can use it to make payments. There are two types of card activation:

• Physical gift card activation using the gift card number.
• Virtual gift card creation and activation using a card activation promotional code.

At the time of gift card purchase, an activation request adds value to the gift card, changes the status of the gift card to active, and returns the necessary information to use the gift card. Both physical and virtual gift cards can be denominated or non-denominated based on whether the gift card has a preset value or not.

Terminology

Prerequisites

1. Merchant selects the Gift card payments checkbox under Ecommerce Payments on the Merchant Dashboard. See Clover Merchant Help.
2. Tokenize the gift card. See Create a gift card token.
3. Generate an Ecommerce API key or apiAccessKey to use as the Authorization header: Bearer token.

Activate virtual gift card

1. Send a POST request to the /v1/activate endpoint to create and activate a virtual gift card.
2. Enter the required parameters in the request based on whether the card is denominated gift card or non-denominated gift card:

Request and Response examples

Create and activate a denominated, virtual gift card

curl --request POST \
--url 'https://scl-sandbox.dev.clover.com/v1/activate' \
--header 'authorization: Bearer <token>' \
--header 'content-Type: application/json' \
--data '{
    "promotion_code": "67062"
}'

{
    "id": "ABC123DE45F6G",
    "amount": 5000,
    "ref_num": "022001",
    "outcome": {
        "network_status": "approved_by_network",
        "type": "authorized"
    },
    "paid": true,
    "status": "succeeded",
    "source": {
        "last4": "0266"
    },
    "gift_card": {
        "security_card_value": "75537209",
        "expiration_date": "2030-01-01",
        "number": "7777373144600266",
        "previous_balance": 0,
        "new_balance": 5000
    }
}

Create and activate a non-denominated, virtual gift card

curl --request POST \
--url 'https://scl-sandbox.dev.clover.com/v1/activate' \
--header 'authorization: Bearer<token>' \
--header 'content-Type: application/json' \
--data '{
    "promotion_code": "67063",
    "amount": 2000,
    "currency": "usd"
}

{
    "id": "ABC123DE45F6G",
    "amount": 2000,
    "ref_num": "021717",
    "outcome": {
        "network_status": "approved_by_network",
        "type": "authorized"
    },
    "paid": true,
    "status": "succeeded",
    "source": {
        "last4": "1096"
    },
    "gift_card": {
        "security_card_value": "3256",
        "expiration_date": "2030-01-01",
        "number": "7777373191541096",
        "previous_balance": 0,
        "new_balance": 2000
    }
}

Activate physical gift card

1. Send a POST request to the /v1/activate endpoint to activate a physical gift card.
2. Enter the required parameters in the request based on whether the card is denominated gift card or non-denominated gift card:

Request and Response example—Activate a denominated physical card

In this example, activate a physical denominated gift card of $50 value. Only the source parameter is required to activate a denominated physical card, which is the gift card token.

curl --request POST \
--url 'https://scl-sandbox.dev.clover.com/v1/activate' \
--header 'authorization: Bearer <token>' \
--header 'content-Type: application/json' \
--data-raw '{
    "source": "clv_1TSxxxxxx2S71ECrva7"
}'

{
    "id": "ABC123DE45F6G",
    "amount": 5000,
    "ref_num": "201108",
    "outcome": {
        "network_status": "approved_by_network",
        "type": "authorized"
    },
    "paid": true,
    "status": "succeeded",
    "source": {
        "last4": "9585"
    },
    "gift_card": {
        "expiration_date": "3030-01-01",
        "previous_balance": 0,
        "new_balance": 5000
    }
}

Related topics

• Use the Ecommerce Gift Card API
• Create a gift card token tutorial
• Create and activate physical and virtual gift card endpoint