bjolysharp

Hi @carolm29,

Thank you for your reply. Looks like you posted it while I was in the midst of drafting my comment.

I’ll take a look at the feature request you mentioned. I also want to point out, that I believe Adobe Commerce is treating gift cards the same way, applying them essentially as discounts. But this seems to assume that the initial gift card purchases are counted as sales and taxed at the time of gift card purchase. It would make sense in this case to treat the gift card as a discount, but this does not align with proper accounting rules.

Hi @shameemreza,

I would like to clarify my last comment. I think my reference to the Gift Card plugin FAQ caused some confusion. While our client is using the Heartland’s Secure Submit plugin for gift cards, it’s essentially behaving the same way as the Woo Gift Card plugin. Like the Gift Card plugin, the Secure Submit plugin deducts the applied gift card amount from the order total, similar to a coupon. This appears to be incorrect, at least according to prevailing accounting rules in the USA. Per https://www.accountingtools.com/articles/accounting-for-gift-cards-gift-certificates:

“The essential accounting for gift cards is for the issuer to initially record them as a liability, and then as sales after the card holders use the related funds… The initial sale of a gift card triggers the recordation of a liability, not a sale. This is a debit to cash and a credit to the gift cards outstanding account. When a gift card is used, the initial liability is shifted into a sale transaction.”

If the initial gift card purchase is not a sale, then it would not be taxed at the time of sale. The gift card amount becomes a liability for the issuing merchant. When the gift card is used to make a purchase, either in-store or online, the amount is applied as a payment to the order total. This way the revenue becomes part of the sale and taxed accordingly.

It would seem to me, the best way to handle prepaid gift cards at Checkout, is to apply them as we would a payment. However, a customer could, theoretically, apply multiple gift cards in one purchase, along with a credit card (or other supported payment method).

Please advise.

I wish to circle back to this issue as it has not been resolved. We are not using premium plugins assumed, This issue pertains to native Woo Commerce gift card accounting behavior.

Our client has $100K+ worth of sold prepaid gift cards through Heartland payments. They accept payments online using Heartland’s SecureSubmit plugin. The problem that we have with prepaid gift cards, is that Woo does not support multiple payment types. Consequently, the order totals are changed when the prepaid gift card is applied. By changing the order totals, this impacts back-end integrations downstream, resulting in problems reconciling sales and revenue reports.

Per the Woo Commerce documentation:

How are prepaid gift cards accounted for?

When using a prepaid gift card to pay for an order, partially or fully, cart/order line items are not discounted and product/order revenue is recorded in full under?Analytics > Products?and?Analytics > Revenue.

However WooCommerce does not natively support multiple payment methods per order. To work around this limitation, the plugin modifies the order total of every order that is paid with gift cards, partially or fully. Plugins that read or display order totals will not be able to correctly identify gift cards as a payment method, unless an integration is written to support Gift Cards.

If the Woo team understands that this limitation, then why not add support for multiple payment methods per order? Is the Woo team planning to add support for multiple payment methods per order?

Thank you

There is an open ticket for HPOS already: https://www.ads-software.com/support/topic/woocommerce-high-performance-order-storage-4/. Last developer reply was 6 months ago. Not sure if they are seriously about HPOS compatibility or not.

I installed the SecureSubmit Gateway plugin version 2.2.2 on WP 6.3.4 and Woo Commerce 8.6.1. Woo detects the plugin as incompatible with High-performance order storage:

This plugin is incompatible with the enabled WooCommerce feature ‘High-Performance order storage’, it shouldn’t be activated.?

Can you please fix this? I want to use HPOS?

Thank you for the reply. I will look to put some pressure on Woo to add support for multiple payments per order.