gift-cards

Shopify includes native gift cards on all plans except Basic. Go to Products → Gift cards in your admin, add a gift card product with denominations as variants, and Shopify automatically generates and emails codes on purchase.

Use an append-only ledger table recording every debit and credit, and compute balance by summing transactions. Apply Math.min(balance, orderTotal) inside a transaction with SELECT FOR UPDATE row locking to cap the redemption safely.

Core WooCommerce does not include gift cards. Use the official WooCommerce Gift Cards extension (~$49/year) or YITH WooCommerce Gift Cards (~$80/year), both of which support email delivery, partial redemption, and balance inquiry shortcodes.

This race condition happens when balance is read and the debit is inserted as separate steps without locking. Fix it by wrapping redemption in a database transaction with SELECT ... FOR UPDATE on the card row before reading the balance.

Many US states and other jurisdictions restrict or prohibit gift card expiration. Check local regulations before enabling expiry dates, and ensure your implementation enforces expiration at balance lookup time.

Generate codes with cryptographically secure randomness (crypto.randomBytes, not Math.random), omit ambiguous characters like 0, O, 1, and I, and never expose full codes in URLs or server logs.