We always recommend testing your entire gift card process after installing any of our gift card apps or making changes to any settings.
Because Shopify gift cards are a payment method and have other special characteristics, you will need to order an actual gift card to test the process.
Here's our recommended way:
- First create a one time use random discount code for 100% off an entire order in the Shopify admin (if you're planning to do more than one test, the number can be adjusted as needed).
- Make a note of what the code is somewhere.
- Visit the public view of your online store and navigate to the gift card page.
- Complete the appropriate fields, if applicable, customize your design and select an amount.
- Add the gift card to your card.
- Begin the checkout process as normal. Be sure to use either your business or personal email account so you will receive the notifications.
- Enter or paste the discount code you created earlier in the code box.
- This should reduce the total of your card to $0 (or the equivalent in your local currency).
- Shopify will let you check out without entering payment information as long as the card remains at $0.
- Complete checkout.
- Check your email for the notifications.
This method may interfere slightly with any metrics you're tracking because an "add to cart" and "begin checkout" even will be triggered. However, since the value is $0, it should have negligible affects of your data.
If you're concerned about the tracking, consider temporarily creating a $1 variant (denomination) and use that to test to minimize the effect on "add to cart" values.
You can alternatively purchase a gift card at full value and then refund the charge, but just keep in mind most payment processors will not refund any processing fees so you'll lose anywhere from a few cents to a few dollars using this method.