You’ve been able to issue gift certificates in Quail since approximately forever, but they’ve never really been as nice as they could be. For a start, you had to print them yourself — and to make them look good required a pretty high-quality (read: expensive) printer and about a pint of colored ink.

And that color ink, oof. It’s a doozy.

In our own stores we’re actually using a mix of Quail-printed gift certificates and Square gift cards. The Quail ones are nice in that they make better, well, gifts; they look more interesting than an anonymous white credit card, and they feel more special. But the Square gift cards are nice and durable (they’re just…credit cards) and it’s hard to beat that.

But we think we ought to try.

We’ve been talking to a couple stores lately, and we’ve come up with an idea. We’re planning to add support to Quail for new, barcode-scannable gift cards. When you have a customer who wants to buy a gift card, you’d just take one out of the stack, scan it (with a barcode reader) in Quail to activate it, and sell it. When they come back in to shop, you’d ring up the sale and just scan it to take payment. We’ll handle tracking the balance left on the card, and — here’s the neat bit — when a gift card is fully spent you can take it back and sell it again, so long as it’s still in good condition.

Given how some people treat their wallets, that might be a bit of a stretch — but it’s there as an option.

What would they look like? Well, we have two options: if you want just a handful of cards we can’t (yet!) customize them to your store, so you’d have to pick from a collection of Quail-designed ones. But each card will have a unique barcode and not be usable until you activate it, so they’ll still be tied to your store. Alternatively, we’ll work with you to design custom cards with your own store logo & branding. Either way, we expect the cards to cost no more than $1 per card — and we’re looking at ways to make them less than that. They’ll come in fixed amounts, so we can print the dollar amount on ‘em and make it clear what they’re worth. Take a look at the mock-up at the top of this post for an example.

If that sounds like something you’d like to use in your store — credit-card-like gift cards that you can sell and redeem, instead of cardstock or paper certificates — let us know at support@quailhq.com. We’re on the fence with this one, and we’re only going to take the plunge if we hear from enough stores who want it.

So let us know!