Showing the buyer's personal message in the gift card email

Someone who buys a gift card through the widget or the contacts portal can write a personal message for the recipient. That message only shows up in the gift card recipient email if the email contains the Personal message tag.

Add the tag to the email

1. Click the gear icon at the top right of the dashboard to open Settings, then click Giftcards under Functionalities. This isn't the Settings item in the sidebar of Store → Giftcards. That one holds a program's own settings, like its name and expiry, and no emails.
2. Under Giftcard recipient emails, click View details on the email, then Edit email.
3. On the Content step, find the Internal order group in the Tags panel on the left and click Personal message. That copies {{internal_order.message}}.
4. Paste it where the message should appear.
5. Click Publish to check the email.

Your changes are saved as you make them, and the next email that goes out already uses them. Publish doesn't hold them back: it only tells you if something's missing. If you'd rather not change the live email while you work, Duplicate it, edit the copy and then make the copy the default.

If you have more than one recipient email, add the tag to the one marked Default. That's the email portal and widget orders go out with.

Where the buyer writes it

• In the widget, the buyer turns on Add personal message and types the message in the field that appears.
• In the contacts portal, it's the Message field below the recipient's details.

You can also read the message on the order itself: go to Store → Giftcards, pick the program the card was sold from, and open the order under Online sales → Orders in the sidebar. Message shows there when the buyer wrote one.

When there's no message

When the buyer didn't write anything, the tag stays empty. So write the text around the tag in a way that still reads well without a message, for example without a heading like "Your message:" right above it.

The tag only works when a portal or widget order sends the email. When an email goes out without an order behind it, the tag isn't filled in and the email shows {{internal_order.message}} as text. That happens when you re-send the email from the card, create a gift card in the dashboard, hand out cards with an issuance, or send a card through the API. For those, pick a recipient email that doesn't contain the tag.

Gift cards sold through Shopify

For gift cards sold through Shopify, the message comes through differently. See Setting up digital gift cards in Shopify.