Sell Gift Certificates through Google Checkout

Original project, Summer 2012: Taylor Therapeutic offered gift certificates to customers in-person but wanted to offer them on his website as well.

The original challenge was to create an interface for his customers to use that would communicate with Google Checkout and then allow them to retrieve and print off their gift certificates as soon as the transaction was finished.

For a single item, it seemed excessive to build out an entire user registration system and shopping cart, particularly since users would then still be required to register their information in Google Checkout directly. On the order form I opted to collect only the information that was not already part of the Checkout registration to reduce user annoyance. This serves the double function of putting the onus for keeping any sensitive information secure on Google — if we don’t collect and store that information locally then there’s no avenue for the information to be compromised, and Google, as the credit card processor, is already obligated to elicit and safely store that information anyway.

Once the order is processed, the customer can retrieve their gift certificate in pdf form from the Taylor Therapeutic website using the order number. This ensures that only successful transactions produce a file, but allows customers to send the certificate on to whomever they’ve bought it for either as a link or a file via email, or to print it themselves.

Update October 2013: I just finished rewriting the gift certificate sales process using Stripe‘s API. I was quite happy at how much more control and versatility Stripe offered to developers, so a natural byproduct of the rewrite was a more streamlined user experience. Users no long have to leave the site to go to Google and then return — they can purchase their gift certificates without ever leaving Taylor Therapeutic’s site. It also permitted me to build a direct link to the completed gift certificate without requiring users to find and input their order number, because I had complete control of the email receipt being sent, and because I could immediately retrieve the transaction id from Stripe before the page finished processing.