Retail
A retail gift card, loyalty card, or discount card should be a sales and branding tool that offers a seamless experience for retailers and their customers.
POS providers can make sure that you have what you need to manufacture your retail gift and loyalty cards anywhere. Toast, Clover, Shopify, Lightspeed, Square, Vagaro, Mindbody and other POS platforms each issue card IDs or serial numbers in their own format, with their own rules about length, character set, and prefixes. These are the numbers that are used to match a gift card or loyalty card to a customer’s assigned account on the POS system. Toast assigns numbers beginning with 862. Shopify accepts codes from 8 to 20 alphanumeric characters. A card printed outside the range your system expects will not activate. So always reach out to your POS company and obtain their specific formatting.
How the number gets read is the second decision. A barcode, a magnetic stripe, or a QR code. Magstripes are encoded at low coercivity, 300 Oersted, or high coercivity, 2750 Oersted. Which one your card reader expects is easy to confirm with your POS provider.
Plastek manufactures retail cards in house, including gift cards, loyalty and discount cards, and promotional cards. Specifications should be confirmed with your POS before a run is produced.
Retail Card Merchandising
Retail is the one vertical where the card has to sell itself before anyone buys it.
Break-away cards snap out of a hanging carrier at the rack. Combo cards pair a full-size card with a key tag, so one purchase gives the customer a wallet card and a keyring card. Die cuts take the card outside the standard rectangle and deliver something whimsical that catches the eye. Scratch offs add an extra level of security for retail gift cards on public display.
Gift card demand concentrates hard into the fourth quarter, and reordering in November means paying for a rush you could have avoided. Also remember that one larger run is more economical than repeated small ones. Plastek produces custom cards in any quantity, with 250 cards being the typical minimum order. However, if you know that you will be sticking with one card design for a few years, it’s always wise to take advantage of the savings produced by ordering enough cards to see through the next few years. This also removes the worry of running out of cards before the holiday selling season.
Request a quote on custom retail cards or call the Plastek production team at 1-888-762-2737.
