Plastic Gift Cards

[morrisn]

For those of you who take plastic gift cards do you run them through a POS or something like GAVA. How does it work for you. Who do you get your cards from and are you happy with them.
For those of you with more than one location, how do you handle this. Are there any POS systems that take care of mutiple locations?

 

[Jackson]

If you plan on selling gift cards on a large scale, will need a main server for all the POS machines to be networked to. There are quite a few systems on the market that can charge gift cards from the terminal. If you are in the market for a new POS system, look for one that will allow you to charge gift cards from the terminal, and allow you to have a customer loyalty program. If you Google "custom gift cards" or other phrases like that, you will find companies that custom print gift cards. A while back, I was thinking about buying gift cards for a restaurant that I worked for, and I found a company that made the cards for around .12 to .15 cents for each card. I was going to buy 1000 gift cards and 1000 customer loyalty cards. I had figured that after all the gift cards were sold, we would break even, because some people lose their gift cards and never redeem them. The owner of the restaurant decided not to invest in the cards, so we did not do it.

If you do not use a central server for your POS systems, you could always contact your credit card processor about a gift card program. The disadvantage of this would be more expensive cards, probably around .25 cents per card. Plus you would pay a fee for each gift card redemption.