# Introduction

About Disco's Givex and Shopify integration

Givex is an omnichannel gift card solution that operates worldwide. It has integrations with a wide number of POS and commerce systems, but no native integration support for the Shopify Plus platform.

[Disco](https://www.discolabs.com) has developed a custom Givex integration for Shopify Plus merchants. Built in close collaboration with Givex and a number of our merchant clients, its goal is to support all of the critical integration points between Shopify Plus and Givex to help merchants give their customers a seamless omnichannel gift card experience.


# How it works

The integration is installed into your Shopify store just like any other Shopify application. Once it's configured with your Givex API credentials, the integration serves as a two-way bridge between Shopify and Givex, handling data calls between the systems whenever a customer requests a balance lookup on their card, purchases a new card, or attempt to redeem an existing card.

It's good to note that as this integration depends on access to checkout customisation and the Shopify Gift Card API, it's currently available only to merchants on the Shopify Plus platform.


# Features

### Balance checking

* Integration exposes an API endpoint that can be called by Shopify theme code to look up the balance of a Givex gift card using its number and PIN.
* This API endpoint can be leveraged by theme developers (whether Disco or another party) to build a bespoke balance checker that integrates perfectly with your existing theme.
* The API endpoint is rate-limited and includes fraud checks to prevent brute forcing of gift card numbers by bad actors.

### Gift card purchases

* Digital and physical gift cards can be purchased online as "regular" Shopify products, at which point Disco's integration will make a provisioning request directly to Givex for creation and delivery of the gift card.
* Gift card purchase pages can be customised to optionally collect the recipients name and email address, and a name and message from the purchaser. If a recipient email is provided for digital cards, they are delivered directly to the recipient.
* A future delivery date can be specified for digital cards, allowing cards to be scheduled to be sent on a particular day (eg a birthday).
* Gift cards purchased online can be redeemed anywhere supported by Givex (eg online and in-store).

### Gift card redemption

* Customers can enter their Givex gift card number (and PIN if required) during the native Shopify checkout experience, and have their gift card balance applied correctly.
* Customers can redeem Givex gift cards from any source (online or in-store) in the Shopify checkout.
* Validation checks are in place pre- and post- checkout to virtually eliminate the risk of double spend issues, and to detect and flag them in the unlikely event they do occur.


# Pricing

All prices are listed in USD.

### One-off

Disco will charge a one-off engagement fee of between USD$7,500 to USD$10,000 for the implementation of the Givex integration. This covers:

* Scoping, discovery and planning;
* Installation, setup and configuration of the integration;
* Conducting the required Givex certification process in collaboration with the Givex team;
* Testing and Quality Assurance in staging and production environments.

The key factors influencing the final fee here are the number of Shopify stores involved, and whether the required Shopify theme changes will be implemented by Disco or another party.

### Ongoing

Disco charges a small hosting and maintenance fee of USD$99/month per Shopify store on an ongoing basis. This fee is intended to cover the cost of maintaining the integration's infrastructure (servers, logging, et cetera), as well as the cost of making any system-wide updates mandated by changes in the Shopify or Givex APIs.

### Customisation

In the event that you require any specific customisations to be made to the Givex integration that aren't supported out of the box, Disco will bill on a time and materials basis for those changes. The scope of any such changes and an estimate for them will be provided in your contract.


# FAQ

* **What currencies does the integration support?**\
  We support any currency that's supported by both Givex and Shopify Plus. Note that currently, an individual Givex and Shopify instance is required for each supported currency.<br>
* **Can I control the appearance and content of the emails sent to digital gift card recipients?**\
  Yes! This is something that is managed by Givex themselves however, so in order to customise these emails you'll need to organise that with them directly.\
  To send different emails based on which gift card product is purchased, we can do this by sending a template ID set as a line item property when the card is added to cart.<br>
* **How do you handle the products for physical and digital gift cards?**\
  All gift cards are uploaded as regular products in Shopify, identified by a particular SKU pattern (eg. GCD-50, GCD-100 etc).\
  Disco Labs' integration only handles delivery of digital gift cards, as we expect physical gift cards to be handled by the merchant's regular fulfilment process.<br>
* **How do you prevent gift card fraud?**\
  All integration endpoints dealing with the verification and/or application of gift cards (balance checking and redemption) are rate-limited to prevent any sort of brute force attack. We support (and strongly recommend) the use of PINs for all gift cards.

  On top of this, Shopify itself employs sophisticated bot detection to block bad actors attempting to automate access to the site.<br>
* **What front end changes are required?**

  You'll need to engage a front end or design agency to make the required theme changes to your store. These changes include:

  1. Addition of a balance checker UI component (either a popup or page, up to the design) that takes a card number and a PIN to check the balance of an existing card. This is just hitting a JSON API endpoint supplied by us.
  2. Customisation of the gift card product page (so a special product page template) to include input fields for the gift card recipient details, sender details and message that translate to line item properties with specific names.
  3. Customisation of the gift card input box in the Shopify checkout to add a PIN and intercept gift card submissions to pass information through to our JSON API endpoint rather than direct to Shopify.
  4. Customisation of emails that are sent from Givex (Givex allows complete HTML customisation).

  \
  Disco Labs typically do the checkout customisations required but we can manage this within the front end repo and workflow.<br>
* **What configuration options are available?**\
  There are a number of options that can be configured on a per-store basis. These include:\
  \ <br>
*
* 1.


# The Process

If you'd like to explore having Disco's Givex integration set up for your own Shopify stores, please get in touch with us at <sales@discolabs.com>. We'll then learn more about your business, run you through a standardised questionnaire (listed below), and provide you with a quote and timeline for the setup process.

Once we have an agreement in place, Disco's Givex integration is installed into your Shopify store in a similar manner to any other Shopify app. We'll then work directly with Givex to have the integration certified for use on your stores (this is required by Givex for each merchant, but is usually straightforward) and configure your integration with the API settings provided by Givex.

We typically test and certify the integration on a "staging" or "development" Shopify store before moving it into production - if you don't already have a staging or development Shopify store, this can be a great opportunity to get this set up.

In addition to the certification and configuration, we need to make two further changes to how your store works:

1. Adding a new "gift card" products to your store, with the formats and denominations you require;
2. Making two changes to your store's theme: (a) creating a special product page to collect additional information from users when they are purchasing gift cards; and (b) making a small customisation to your checkout to enable the validation of gift cards via Givex rather than Shopify.

Once you're certified and tested, we can go ahead and launch! Disco will handle any support required in the first few weeks after launch as part of our engagement. Ongoing, our hosting and maintenance fee covers the cost of us keeping the integration servers running, ensuring uptime and availability, and making any system-wide changes mandated by changes in the Givex or Shopify APIs.


# Questionnaire

We ask the following questions as part of every Givex integration project we undertake. If you're able to provide answers to these right off the bat, that will be a great help for us. If you don't have answers on hand right now, no problems - we'll walk through these on our initial call.

1. Are you a current Shopify Plus merchant, or planning to move to Shopify Plus?
2. Do you have a signed contract with Givex, or are you in the negotiation process?
3. Do you have a timeline for implementation?
4. Do you have any other systems (eg POS) integrated or planning to be integrated with Givex?
5. Please list the Shopify store instances you're currently running (including their domain name), and indicate their purpose, currency, and whether they will need to integrate with Givex or not.
6. Please list the gift card denominations you would like to be available on each store (eg USD$25, USD$50, USD$100).
7. Do you have one or more "staging" or "development" Shopify store instances? If so, please list them and their domain name.
8. Which of the following Givex features do you need to be implemented on your Shopify store:
   * Gift card balance checking;
   * Gift card purchases;
   * Gift card redemption.
9. Do you want to sell only physical gift cards, only digital gift cards, or both?
10. Do you currently have a gift card system in place? If so, please provide details on the system in use, the number of active gift cards in use, the format of the gift card numbers in question (eg "16 characters, numbers only"), and whether the gift cards require a PIN.
11. Have you confirmed with Givex the desired format of gift card numbers for new gift cards, and whether you'll be requiring a PIN? (The ideal approach for our Shopify integration is 20-digit non-sequential codes with a PIN).
12. Who is currently managing your Shopify theme? Are there any theme development workflow practices (source control, automated deployment tools) in place?
13. Do you currently have any theme customisations applied to your Shopify checkout pages?
14. For the purposes of purchasing new gift cards online, Disco will create a new Gift Card product on your store with variants for each of the gift card formats (digital or physical) and denominations required. Our default approach is to create these variants with SKUs in the format `GCP25` (physical gift card with $25 value) or `GCD50` (digital gift card with $50 value). Please confirm this will be acceptable or if you'll require any changes here.