Giftbit
money-back gift cards as a service.
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Giftbit Payment API - Stripe for gift cards

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Giftbit Payment API is now

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Maker
Hi everyone, I'm the cofounder of Giftbit. I'm pleased to launch the beta of Giftbit's Payment API. This gives online merchants and retailers their own powerful gift card tools. Plus, Giftbit also promotes and sells a merchant's gift cards in our marketplace. Giftbit completely eradicates any gift card waste, as we refund the account of the gift card buyer if the gift card recipient never spends the card value (despite everyone's best efforts). This allows the buyer to send a new gift card to a new recipient and drive sales and customer acquisition at the merchant. I'm here to answer your questions and get your feedback. Thanks, Leif
Maker
Here's a link to the api docs:
sounds a cool concept. Added in my try list. Will share experience afterwards.
Say, can't this be useful to SAAS businesses too? Instead of offering a '10% discount', offer a gift card. If it's redeemed - great, your promotion worked. If it didn't, with GiftBit you can get your money back. If providing a gift card proves a more effective way to increase conversion to paying customers over traditional discounts that's huge. - replace promotion codes with gift cards.
Maker
Hey Ehud. Giftbit's money-back gift cards can easily support your use case. By making the offer a gift card, it also becomes unique and more useful for marketing because you can tie a specific code to a signup/contact.
What scenarios do you think will this API be most useful for?
Maker
Giftbit's payment API gives a merchant a complete gift card platform with minimal dev effort on their part. There has been a lot of interest in the new sales distribution that a merchant gets by running our API. Giftbit also enables internal teams at the merchant to send and track gift cards for marketing and partnerships.
Awesome! How have merchants been onboarding to your API?
I was waiting for the typical hidden text saying US/Canada only. It's refreshing to see you service Australia! Giftbit looks awesome! Are you planning to release a Magento extension?
Maker
yes. We are working on integrations with some of the big ecommerce services. Sign up for the beta and let's chat!
What is the most common gift card consumers typically want? Amazon?
Maker
This payment API is to enable new merchants to have a world class gift card program and access the same sort of sales distribution that large companies like Amazon have.
Maker
Consumers usually want choice but there are a lot of online companies that don't get distribution to consumers or corporate rewards and incentive programs. Giftbit is helping to change that.
Looks great Leif, Peter and team - keep up the awesome work!
What happens if the gift card buyer never uses the money on the card? (When bought through one of our websites).
Maker
You control what happens to unspent value if you sell your own card to a consumer from your own site. Giftbit enables you to give bulk buyers and your marketing team the ability to send gift cards and get credit-back for unspent value. In our experience, consumers do not want to know if a gift card they gave was spent or not. The problem for online merchants is that unspent gift cards are a massive headache to manage and the full unspent value has to be paid to the government in most states. Giftbit is working on a solution for this problem through pre-select charity allocations with a consumer buyer.
Maker
We updated our product and rebranded to Lightrail. Check it out:
You have a fund account option with wire transfer that has a wait time of 7 days. What use cases do you see where a user would want to load their giftbit by waiting about 7+ days before sending a gift ?
Maker
First, we apply funds as fast as possible. Usually within a day. Second, you're looking at the buyer portal, which was built for corporate rewards and incentive programs, not consumers.
Maker
We updated our product and rebranded to Lightrail. Check it out:
looks wicked!