How to Send Gift Card Code to Customer

In this document, you’ll learn how to send a customer the gift card code they purchased.

Overview

Once the customer purchases a gift card, they should receive the code of the gift card so that they can use it in future purchases.

Typically, the code would be sent by email, however, you’re free to choose how you deliver the gift card code to the customer.

This document shows you how to track when a gift card has been purchased so that you can send its code to the customer.

You can alternatively use the SendGrid plugin, which handles sending the email automatically.

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Prerequisites

Medusa Components

It's assumed that you already have a Medusa backend installed and set up. If not, you can follow the quickstart guide to get started. The Medusa backend must also have an event bus module installed, which is available when using the default Medusa backend starter.

Notification Provider

To send an email or another type of notification method, you must have a notification provider installed or configured. You can either install an existing plugin or create your own.

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Step 1: Create a Subscriber

To subscribe to and handle an event, you must create a subscriber.

You can learn more about subscribers in the Subscribers documentation.

Create the file src/subscribers/gift-card.ts with the following content:

src/subscribers/gift-card.ts

type InjectedDependencies = {
  // TODO add necessary dependencies
}

class GiftCardSubscriber {
  constructor(container: InjectedDependencies) {
    // TODO subscribe to event
  }
}

export default GiftCardSubscriber

You’ll be adding in the next step the necessary dependencies to the subscriber.

You can learn more about dependency injection in this documentation.

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Step 2: Subscribe to the Event

In this step, you’ll subscribe to the event gift_card.created to send the customer a notification about their gift card.

There are two ways to do this:

Method 1: Using the NotificationService

If the notification provider you’re using already implements the logic to handle this event, you can subscribe to the event using the NotificationService:

src/subscribers/gift-card.ts

import { NotificationService } from "@medusajs/medusa"

type InjectedDependencies = {
  notificationService: NotificationService
}

class GiftCardSubscriber {
  constructor({ notificationService }: InjectedDependencies) {
    notificationService.subscribe(
      "gift_card.created", 
      "<NOTIFICATION_PROVIDER_IDENTIFIER>"
    )
  }
}

export default GiftCardSubscriber

Where <NOTIFICATION_PROVIDER_IDENTIFIER> is the identifier for your notification provider. For example, if you’re using SendGrid, the identifier is sendgrid.

You can learn more about handling events with the Notification Service using this documentation.

Method 2: Using the EventBusService

If the notification provider you’re using isn’t configured to handle this event, or you want to implement some other custom logic, you can subscribe to the event using the EventBusService:

src/subscribers/gift-card.ts

import { 
  EventBusService,
  GiftCardService,
} from "@medusajs/medusa"

type InjectedDependencies = {
  eventBusService: EventBusService
  giftCardService: GiftCardService
}

class GiftCardSubscriber {
  giftCardService: GiftCardService

  constructor({ 
    eventBusService, 
    giftCardService, 
  }: InjectedDependencies) {
    this.giftCardService = giftCardService
    eventBusService.subscribe(
      "gift_card.created", this.handleGiftCard)
  }

  handleGiftCard = async (data) => {
    const giftCard = await this.giftCardService.retrieve(
      data.id
    )
    // TODO send customer the gift card code
  }
}

export default GiftCardSubscriber

When using this method, you’ll have to handle the logic of sending the code to the customer inside the handler function, which in this case is handleGiftCard.

The handleGiftCard event receives a data object as a parameter. This object holds the id property which is the ID of the gift card. You can retrieve the full gift card object using the GiftCardService