When customers want to design their branded gift card experience by providing us with files, we still charge an integration fee.
We are often asked why we still charge for integrations.
There are several important points to keep in mind about this fee:
- Whenever we have to integrate a new design, whether it's one we create for our gift card library that everyone can use or one for just one client, there are several manual steps needed to make this happen. We charge a fee to cover the time it takes for us to complete these steps.
- Many customers mistakenly thing we just take your files and send them somewhere. However, we have a process in place for all branded designs that includes verification and quality checks of the files you submit, setting up and verifying the template in our backend, testing it and communicating the progress with you. Once you approve a look, we take some additional steps so your store is able to use it.
- In addition, when we design your gift card, we upload all of your files to premium servers for storage, including creating backup copies on other servers. We have to cover the cost of having these files, which can only be used by you, for the life of your store since branded designs are a one time fee only. This is different that general designs we create for holidays and occasions that almost any store could use since, although there is still a cost to store these files, more than one store can use them, which makes the cost of storing these files more efficient.
- We started offering branded gift card designs by customer demand and the first customers to use this were higher volume stores who paid substantially higher fees. We've since streamlined our system so that this option is more accessible to other businesses, but since there's custom work no matter if we're designing or just integrating, we still have to take time to complete integrations.
- If we were to offer integrations for free or an extremely low price, we would likely be flooded with requests and this would become much less of an exclusive feature. We prefer to keep this as a "premium" feature for merchants willing to invest a still relatively small amount of money to have it implemented.
- Keep in mind that the integration (or design) fee is a one time investment for your business. We do not charge recurring fees for this. You only pay the monthly app fees, which are the same whether or not you have a branded design or not.
- Finally, keep mind that if you were having gift cards custom printed, as an example, there is typically a set up fee or, if there's not such a fee listed, you're likely paying for it as part of the printing costs.