Gift Card API - Built to Power Every Store You Run

Yes. 99minds has native plugins for Shopify and BigCommerce that wrap the API and fire the same signed webhooks on every issue, redeem, reload, and refund, so you can activate gift cards from the app store without writing code. For headless or custom storefronts, you call the REST endpoints directly.

A gift card API is a set of HTTP endpoints that let your application issue, redeem, reload, and track gift cards programmatically, instead of you building that ledger yourself. A production-ready one should cover the full lifecycle: issuing and selling digital or physical cards, checking balances, redeeming full or partial amounts, reloading, refunding, voiding transactions, activating or deactivating cards, and cashing out remaining balances. It also needs signed webhooks so your app knows when something changes, Bearer token authentication with separate keys for client and server use, published rate limits, and a sandbox for testing before you touch live balances. The 99minds Gift Card API covers all of these out of the box, exposing nine lifecycle actions as REST endpoints, rate-limited at 150 requests per minute per IP address, plus multi-store routing and loyalty integration on the same gift card object.

Call the issue endpoint with a POST request specifying the card type (digital or physical), the amount, and optionally a campaign, a custom greeting message, and a scheduled delivery date. You can issue a single card for a one-off purchase or pass an array to issue in bulk, for example for a corporate rewards batch. The API generates and returns a unique gift card number for each card it creates.

At checkout, call the balance endpoint first to confirm the card is active and has enough funds, then apply the redemption with a POST request that includes a unique client_order_id tied to your order. That client_order_id makes the call idempotent, so if your checkout retries the request after a timeout, the card is never charged twice. The response returns the updated balance immediately, so you can apply it against the order total in the same request cycle.

Keep your API key server-side only. A client-side or mobile-embedded key is the most common way gift card credentials end up scraped and stuffed against checkout forms. Use separate keys for your website and your server, as 99minds' auth model supports, so a leaked client-side key can't be used to issue or redeem funds directly. Rate-limit redemption attempts per card and per IP on your own layer in addition to the API's published 150 requests per minute, log and alert on repeated failed redemption attempts against the same card number, and never log a full gift card number or claim code in plaintext. All traffic already runs over TLS 1.2 or higher with balances encrypted at rest with AES-256, but the application-layer controls above are still yours to implement. Every response also tells you how many requests you have left before you hit that limit, so you can back off proactively instead of discovering the ceiling mid-incident.

Every transaction, including redemption, fires a signed webhook the moment it happens, so you don't have to poll the balance endpoint to find out. 99minds signs each payload with HMAC-SHA256 so you can verify it actually came from 99minds before acting on it, and retries delivery up to 5 times over roughly 4.5 hours if your endpoint is briefly unreachable. Subscribe your endpoint once and you'll get an event for issuance, redemption, reload, refund, and void, so your app's own state stays in sync without extra API calls.

Every card and transaction carries a currency_code, so balances and redemptions are always denominated in a specific currency rather than converted silently behind the scenes. 99minds' multi-currency gift card solution lets Shopify and Shopify Plus merchants issue, sell, and redeem cards in a shopper's local currency, with conversion following Shopify's native exchange rate logic. If you're integrating directly against the REST API outside of Shopify, confirm current multi-currency and cross-border support for your specific setup with the 99minds team before launch.

There isn't a dedicated low-balance alert endpoint, but you can build one on top of the two primitives 99minds already exposes. Poll the balance endpoint for your pre-funded wallet's card on whatever schedule fits your risk tolerance, or, better, listen for the webhook events fired on every load and redemption against it, and trigger your own alert through email, Slack, or your on-call tool when the returned balance crosses a threshold you define. Because every webhook is signed and retried automatically, you won't miss the transaction that pushed the balance below your limit.