Is it possible for customers to set up automatic, recurring reloads of their gift cards when the balance on their gift card reaches zero or drops below a pre-designated minimum balance that the custom sets him/herself? If not, could I ask this be submitted as a Feature Request?
My point of reference for this would be the gift card option at Starbucks. Say when I originally load my Starbucks gift card, I put $25 on it. Then I can save my credit card info to my Starbucks account and link my newly loaded gift card to said account. At that time, I can also select to have my gift card be automatically reloaded using my credit card on file if my balance falls below a certain threshold. In this case, I might set my minimum gift card balance at $10 and make my preferences such that Starbucks automatically reloads $25 onto my card. That way, any time my gift card balance drops below $10, Starbucks will automatically charge my credit card that I have on file for $25 and increase my gift card balance by $25 to be used on future purchases.
Benefits I see from this:
1. Reduce the number of physical gift cards that get thrown away because they are constantly being saved and reused/reloaded. This cuts down on my cost per gift card as a business owner because I'm not losing out on the price I paid for each physical gift card just to give an existing customer another new card. I don't know about other places, but typically when our customers use up the last of their gift card balance, they give them back to us or throw them away. If that customer in question loads 10 gift cards a year and I have to give them a new card every time, that's a lot of money I could be saving (or at least using more efficiently/effectively) if that customer instead just reloaded the same card 10 times rather than getting 10 new cards. We do our best to re-use our gift cards but over time they get bent, beat up, scuffed, etc and aren't presentable enough to hand out again.
2. My customers now *ALWAYS* have money to spend with me! It's almost like they have their own little budget for my cafe sitting in their wallet. It happens automatically so they don't actually have to make the conscious decision to buy from me - it's already done for them which reduces that pain point of separating with their money. This ties into a larger point...
3. The larger point being that it reduces the barrier for customers to come back to me. AND, more likely, they will come back even MORE frequently than before. In my case, my loyalty customers visit my shop, on average, 2x per week - I could see this sort of feature upping that to 2.5 or 3x per week which would be huge for our shop! I know that when I had my automatic reload on my card for Starbucks, I frequented them more often (even if it was out of my way or further than other options) because I could always just use the money on my gift card. I figured "well I technically already spent the money here by loading this gift card up - I should use that money first since I'm basically getting food/drink for free rather than pulling my credit/debit card out and spending even more money at some other place". Or in another scenario, I would stop in if I was nearby JUST BECAUSE I had money loaded on my gift card. Had I not had that money already sitting on that card, I probably would not have made the impulse stop
4. Customers never have to worry about missing out on loyalty points if they are always using their gift card to pay for things as it will be linked to their loyalty account. I know this works just as well for credit and debit cards...but if customers get a new card, use a different card, pay with cash, or their spouse/significant other uses their own form of payment it requires diligence on both the part of my staff and that of the customer in question to ensure their loyalty number gets entered in. Even if it helps reduce missed loyalty check-ins by 5-10%, that's not an insignificant number. Plus, the more points our customers are able to accumulate, the more likely they are to come back to us so they can use them which helps bolster that weekly/monthly repeat business even more
Would love to know if this is a feature! I'd also love to hear from others about this to see if anyone else thinks this is a good idea (or bad idea!) and get their perspectives
