All About Card9
About Card9
As a group of professionals with dozens of our own e-commerce websites, we wanted to design a system that could create and accept gift cards to offer to our customers. Gift card sales are big business - more than $80 billion is spent every year on gift cards, and gift cards are expected to be at least 67% of all holiday gift giving this season. Yet small to medium sized websites like ours had no way of creating and selling or distributing gift cards.We wanted to be able to create card numbers that only worked on our own sites, each one loaded with the amount we wanted, and then create our own plastic gift cards just like the big retailers offered. So we put our engineers to work designing a system that functioned like a credit card payment gateway, but without ever having to exchange any real money. The front-end of the system allowed us to log in and create card numbers in bulk, each with a predefined balance, then indicate whether we wanted to print them or just use them as 'virtual card numbers' where we give the number to someone in an e-mail. For the ones we wanted to print, we just created and uploaded a nice front graphic and the system took care of generating the card backs with card numbers. We purchased the equipment required to create and encode the cards, and when the whole system was completed we had a great in-house solution that worked across all of our e-commerce sites.
We were creating and selling plastic gift cards for our online stores that were the same high quality credit card size and thickness that the big retailers sell. And as we would visit trade shows and meet other webmasters and online business owners, nearly everyone was telling us they wanted to be able to do the same thing with their sites and offering to pay us to make gift cards for their stores too. So we reworked the back-end to allow for more open access, changed a few algo's to increase the number of cards we could potentially create and the randomness of the numbers, and a bunch of other geeky stuff. In the end, Card9 was born - and now that we're here, our method of creating and accepting gift cards can help you improve online sales just like it helped our own sites.
See what our clients have to say about our product and how it's helped to improve online sales.