Gift cards

Gift cards are money you can buy for yourself or send to someone else. This page explains how they’re delivered, how they behave, and what happens with refunds.

Buying and sending a card

When you add a gift card to your cart, you can fill in a recipient email, a recipient name, your name, a message, and a send date. Every field is optional and you can edit them in your cart right up until checkout.

A card always has to reach someone

If you leave the recipient email blank, the card is delivered to you — the contact on your order. But on a store that lets you order without an email, checkout will ask for a recipient contact on gift-card lines, so a card is never bought and then left with no way to reach anyone.

Scheduling delivery

You can schedule a card to send on a future date, up to 90 days ahead. A date in the past or an invalid one is flagged at checkout — it’s never quietly sent right away instead.

For example

You buy a birthday gift card and set it to send next Friday. Your own order page keeps the code hidden until then, so you don’t accidentally spoil the surprise, and the recipient gets it on the day.

When the code is issued

A gift-card code is created and sent only once the order is fully paid — an actual card payment, or a manual payment the store has marked as collected. A card is never issued on an unpaid cash-on-delivery or deposit order. Codes are like cash: once issued they can be spent by whoever holds them.

The recipient gets their own private card page showing the code, its value, the live balance, and a resend option. A third-party recipient only sees the card — never your order.

Note

For safety, a resend you trigger yourself always goes to the original recipient and never before the scheduled send date — you can’t redirect a code to a new address. Only the store owner can resend to a different email.

Currencies and expiry

1. A gift card is locked to the currency it was issued in. It can only be spent on, topped up with, or refunded in that same currency.
2. Expiry is optional, and off by default — most cards never expire. When a store sets one, it must be a future date. On stores in India, new cards default to at least a year.

Using and refunding cards

• A gift card can’t pay for another gift card, for tax, or for a cash-on-delivery fee — this closes off ways to game the system.
• A refund onto a card needs the card to be active and not expired; refunding onto an expired or disabled card is declined, with a prompt to reactivate or extend it first.
• A refund onto a card can’t exceed the card’s original value, so a card can’t become a bottomless top-up across orders.

Caution

A store owner can’t deactivate a card while a checkout is actively using it — you’d see a brief “this card is in use, retry in a few minutes.” This makes sure a store’s stop-card action can’t silently fail in the middle of a payment.

What happens on cancel or refund

Cancelling an order never claws back a gift card the order issued. Refunds settle against the cards the order issued: unspent cards are emptied first, then partly spent cards down to their remaining balance — already-spent value is never clawed back, and a card someone is mid-way through using is left untouched.

Cards are never deleted; deactivating one is reversible, and every change and every balance movement is written to a running record, so a store’s balances always add up. A card’s balance never goes above its face value or below zero.