Overview

Blackhawk Network's Digital Gift Services provide all the behind-the-scenes functionality that makes it easy for you to build customer facing applications to sell and manage gift cards, eGifts, and prepaid and stored value products digitally. When your application manages all the aspects of a stored value card, your users have the ability to check a balance, redeem funds, and reload funds on the card. By correctly incorporating our services into your applications, you can focus on building great user-facing features and rest assured that the processes behind them provide an automatic, seamless, completely reliable user experience.

What are Blackhawk Network's Digital Gift Services?

The Digital Gift Services consist of multiple sets of APIs to manage different aspects of the process from consumer card purchase to card servicing and management.

Your application connects to Blackhawk Network's transaction capabilities through our RESTful APIs. These services enable your application to manage the various processes you and your customers undertake with gift cards.

Our public facing services provide the same integration for all brands and products your application supports. This means that you can be free to develop features and functionality without being aware of integration details for each card you sell or manage through your application.

468 — Blackhawk Network Digital Gift Services Diagram

Our services can be used to address a range of business use cases. Here are a few primary examples:

Card Registration

With our services, you can associate card accounts with the individuals who purchased or own them to mitigate fraud. You can provide brand-specific information such as descriptions, artwork, terms and conditions, and transactions supported. You can also provide support information, such as how customers can contact customer support and your lost or stolen policy. The primary registration use cases we support include the following:

Create person and bag: Create records that are associated with individual card owners and create "bags" where cards can be stored and managed, such as in a digital wallet.
Verify an account: Verify the card information with the service provider.
Check a card balance (as available): Perform a balance inquiry.

Card Purchase

Our APIs enable the ability to sell gift cards digitally and provide the redemption experience through our eGift application. With Blackhawk Network Digital Gift Services, your application has the ability to sell a wide variety of prepaid, gift cards, and stored value products that can be used for single retailers or as "open loop" cards that can be used like credit cards at any retailer. The primary purchasing use cases we support include the following:

Retrieval of a product catalog and the sellable products: Retrieve the contents of an entire product catalog along with the product ID of products that can be sold. Cache the information.
Perform all functions related to the enablement and disablement of eGifts: Create, suspend/unsuspend, reverse, and void a purchase
eGift Presentment: Provide a URL to redeem an eGift purchased that can be displayed in browser on a desktop or mobile phone using our eGift application.

Card Usage

Our Digital APIs support, as available, the range of transaction types that your users can perform: balance inquiry, balance transfer, manage cards in a bag and reload additional funds on a card. The APIs also provide redemption characteristics, such as barcode information to generate a barcode. The primary card use cases supported include:

Redemption display: Display artwork and card information to facilitate the sale and management of any supported card.
Reload card: Add value to an existing card
Reverse transaction: Reverse a transaction performed using a card
Balance Inquiry: Get a balance on a card

To learn about how to implement the most common use cases for managing gift cards and selling eGifts, read our tutorials.

Services Technology

You call our services through a set of flexible, easy-to-integrate RESTful APIs. Your API calls communicate with our services using JSON requests and responses over HTTPS. To help you learn how to build applications using our APIs, we provide a certification environment that connects to a working version of our Digital Gift Services. If you have a valid client certificate from Blackhawk Network, you can use the certification environment to test your applications against the services.

For Blackhawk Network Digital Gift Services implementation details, see our API Reference, which provides complete documentation about API resources, elements, and operations, as well as examples of JSON requests and responses you can use as the basis of your own JSON requests.

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