Implementing giftcards

Have you ever received a gift card or bought one for someone? Given that we are in the holiday season, a lot of giftcards are going to be purchased and used! I recently completed a consulting project implementing a digital gift card for a business. Here’s what happened behind the scenes and what I learned.

The background

  • This was for a client who has a service based business. They wanted to add giftcards so that existing customers could gift the service to their friends. It is something that they have been wanting to do for several years.
  • It would be a new revenue stream for the business and a way to get new customers to try it out who might not otherwise buy it. 
  • The client had an existing WordPress website with no eCommerce functionality. They used Square for payments. 
  • They wanted it available for the holiday period (Thanksgiving/Black Friday, Christmas)

Learnings

  • I learned there’s a lot of digital gift card options out there! If you are already using an eCommerce website, such as Shopify, Squarespace, etc… see if they provide their own gift card product. Otherwise you can use a 3rd party solution. I decided to use Giftup for the client as they had a WordPress integration, offered digital cards, and the cards could be sent via email. The cards can also be stored on your phone’s digital wallet. 

Giftup Digital Gift Cards

  • I started the process with a spike. The purpose of the spike was to do an initial investigation to test out key assumptions and risks. I wanted to get it up and running to test out the main user flow to see if it would hang together. It revealed that the user flow that has a lot of touch points from: 
    1. Buying the giftcard on the website using online checkout
    2. Email notifications for the buyer, recipient, business
    3. Internal dashboard for the business
    4. Adding it to mobile wallet (Apple Wallet/Google Wallet)
    5. Redeeming giftcard and checking balance

    Giftup Digital Card in Apple Wallet

    Giftup Digital Card in Apple Wallet

  • The area that concerned me the most was integrating with the payment gateway, as there were some unknowns there. Giftup’s recommended gateway is Square and the client also was a customer of Square. So this made it a lot easier to hook it up and test. Giftup also provide a test credit card, so you can test out the payment flow as well. 

  • There is no upfront cost or monthly fees for the business to use giftcard. However, the business is charged a commission on the value of the giftcard sold. Giftup takes 3.5% of the gift card value and the payment gateway takes their cut (about 2% – 2.5%). So overall, there is a cut of ~5% that the business will pay. For example, if a customer buys a $100 giftcard, the recipient will receive a $100 giftcard in value. For the business, they will receive $95. There will be a $5 commission that will go to Giftup and Square. There is an option to offset these fees by charging it to the customer. In the example above, the customer would now pay an additional $5 fee on the $100 giftcard. So the total cost for the giftcard would be $105 for the customer.

  • Testing it out with real users was invaluable. It revealed potential friction points and areas where a user might get confused e.g. How do I redeem the giftcard after I receive the email? Where do I check my balance? Where can I get help? 

  • From an internal testing perspective, Giftup’s testing environment requires that you are logged in to Giftup and have test mode on. You also need to be in the same browser for Giftup and the website you are integrating with. Testing was a bit difficult until I realized you had to meet all of these requirements. 

  • On the business side, there is a useful internal dashboard for business to check balances, manage cards (redeem, top up and void). You can also get analytics on all actions and lifecycle – email sent, email received, clicked, added to wallet, email delivery void, etc… You can setup as many gift card values as you like eg $50, $100, $200 and custom amounts where the customer can input a value.

    Giftup internal dashboard

    Giftup internal dashboard

  • Overall, I found the experience integrating Giftup was pretty good! They have integrations with a lot of platforms (eCommerce, blogs, etc..) and an API. Their setup process is easy to follow. From the user perspective, the giftcard checkout is intuitive to use. You can try it out the Giftup demo here.

    Giftup checkout demo

    Giftup checkout demo


Client Feedback

It was a fun project and it was completed in time for the holiday period. This was the feedback I got from the client:  

“I want to express my gratitude to Matt because he really heard me out and executed a vision faster than anyone else has as it pertains to my site/business growth.”

Happy holidays everyone! And hopefully you get a giftcard over the holidays 🙂 

Building my own apps vs AI

I love cooking, seeing all the ingredients come together and tasting the finished product. When I go out to eat, I like to order something that I can also make because I want to compare it. Does it taste as good? What ingredients did they use? How can my cooking be improved? While I have been on this coding journey, I have also been curious to compare the apps I built myself versus what AI could produce.

Here’s what I have discovered using Lovable.dev, Builder.io, Rocket.new and GitHub Copilot with ChatGPT-5, and Gemini 2.5 Flash (for image generation). I have been looking under the hood to see the code the AI produced, what frameworks were used, and the designs implemented. I’ve also been building some new apps using vibe coding.

Continue reading

Learning to code

I have been learning to code and have really enjoyed the process. I have gone through various stages – fun, frustration, patience, and finally happy when the thing actually works the way I had imagined! For the 3rd project of my javascript course, I made a digital basketball scoreboard: https://bballscoreboard2.netlify.app/.

I took a design in Figma and turned it into a simple app. I’ve discovered its a multi-dimensional problem trying to figure out figma, html, css and javascript. Then you add in learning VS Code, Github and Netlify to host it! There was no vibe coding – I did it on my own and mostly avoided the use of AI. I have found that you need to be persistent and keep coming back to the problem over time. Try different things, look up things online, research, test it out and compare it back to the original design. In the end, I did use some AI help with Github copilot for a small CSS issue (oh they can be so fiddly!). That was more out of curiosity.

My goal is to become more technical and be able to build my own apps. I also see that the role of Product Managers are blending with developers and designers with the use of AI. ChatGPT classified me as upper level beginner developer given my background with python and other courses I’ve done. I’d love to be able to build my own apps, join hackathons as a developer and contribute to open source projects. It’s the start of a journey!

Impressive yet scary demo of Sora, OpenAI’s new video tool

This video showed some demos of OpenAI’s new product called Sora which can generate videos. I can’t even fathom what the implications are. From replacing animation / video production of short videos to spreading misinformation. AI’s capabilities are moving fast. I guess this was the next logical step after generating images to then videos, which are probably a lot of images combined together.

I really liked the interviewer Joanna Stern from WSJ and have watched some of her videos. She was willing to ask some hard questions like “where are you getting the content from? youtube?”, and “will it be before or after the US election?”. Sora is not available yet, but should be coming sometime in 2024.

Creating a culture of innovation with Shipit

I found out today that my Shipit was selected for the founder’s death match, which means we will be presenting in front of our co-CEO’s at Atlassian. For those that don’t know, Shipit is a 24 hour hackathon which we have quarterly. You form a team, build something and then pitch it to an audience made of your co-workers at your local office. People vote on it and the top 2 winners go on to the next round.

We ended up winning the whole thing in Mountain View office! Its an exciting feeling to have come first in the office based on votes by your co-workers. Now we’ve been selected in the top 2 around the world to present in front of our CEO’s. Hence its called the founder death match!

I can’t tell you my idea because then I’d have to kill you 🙂 Its top secret haha. But I wanted to write to tell you what I like about Shipit and what it means to me.

Continue reading

March Madness – Road To The Final Four

I had an incredible experience at the March Madness NCAA College Basketball tournament in San Jose. Its definitely a special moment and one to check off the bucket list to see a March Madness game. Its a college basketball tournament where the 68 top college teams compete for the championship. I have to admit that I don’t know a lot about college sports. Nevertheless it was exciting to attend and be a part of it. Having gone to college (or “uni”) in Australia, I don’t have the same connection to a college in the US or the connection to college sports as people from the U.S. College sports was never a huge thing in Australia. In the U.S its a big deal. People travel from all around the country to attend these games and they passionately follow the colleges they graduated from.

Continue reading

Ranking 3rd on Google search results for “Product Management Prioritization”

Every time I went to Medium.com which was roughly once a week to read an article, I saw that I was getting notifications that people were “clapping” for my blog posts. It was mostly for a blog I wrote called “Prioritization For Product Managers”. Upon further investigation today, I was surprised to find that it had 3,700 views (all time). I was also getting these regular emails from Medium.

Continue reading

What I’ve been up to

A friend asked me for my podcast recently and I realized after looking at the date of the podcast that I haven’t done one for over a year. I also haven’t blogged since April. Its tough because I’ve had other priorities and that thing called life got in the way. I was inspired by my friend’s Ned Dwyer’s quick and short update on “Now” so I’m going to do something similar. Typically I would do this update at the end of the year, but why not kind of over half-way through the year? So here it goes….

Continue reading