If you sell gift cards for your shop, you will find this relevant.
This week, JB Hi-Fi started taking preorders for the new gaming consoles. There is from the public much interest in these consoles. Sales for these consoles are expected to be huge.
However, there was an exciting twist that took these preorders into the news.
JB Hi-Fi announced that to preorder you could not use your JB Hi-Fi gift card for payment. This started a stir on social media, as this was seen as unfair. The argument here was that no-one said anything about such a restriction when they got these gift cards. So began a media storm. Here are some samples here and here.
Soon JB Hi-Fi reversed its position and now will accept gift-cards for preorders.
The lesson here is that you cannot restrict people from using your gift cards as cash unless you write something in your terms and conditions. If you have some technical reason why you must only accept cash, then do what JB Hi-Fi did get people to pay in cash and then reimburse them from the credit card in cash.
Note: I our POS Software you can restrict customers from using their gift cards, but we do not recommend that you do. You can also do the reimbursement into cash.
