Selling craft workshop gift vouchers that survive Christmas

What exactly is a bindro gift card?

It is money on account with your studio. Somebody chooses an amount between $5 and $500, gives the recipient's email address and their own, and pays. bindro mints one card, emails the code to the recipient and the receipt to the buyer, and holds the money as a liability — you are credited nothing and the platform earns nothing until a place is actually booked with it. The card stays valid for 24 months and can be spent across more than one booking, with any remainder staying on it.

What it is not is a voucher for a named class. There is no "one place at the Saturday wheel-throwing workshop" product: you cannot restrict a card to one workshop, one date or one price, and a recipient can spend it on whatever you have on sale when they get round to booking. For most studios that is fine and arguably better — but it changes the words you print, and a studio that advertises "gift a pottery class" and delivers a balance will spend December explaining the difference.

• Amount: $5 to $500. A six-week course at $600 cannot be gifted in one card.
• Validity: 24 months from purchase.
• Scope: anything your studio has on sale — not restrictable to one class.
• Money: held as a liability, credited to you only when a place is booked with it.

How do I sell a class as a gift when the product is a balance?

Publish the amount, not the mechanism. Put the price of each workshop on your gift page — "a wheel-throwing evening is $85; a Saturday intensive is $160" — and let the buyer choose that number. The recipient then books the class they want at the price you published, and the balance covers it. This is the copy that works, because it lets the buyer feel they are gifting a class while the product does the thing it actually does.

Write the limits into the same page rather than into a support reply in January. Two sentences do it: the card is spendable on any of our workshops within 24 months, and the code is emailed straight to the recipient as soon as you pay. A buyer who reads that in advance makes a different, better decision about when to buy.

When does the recipient get the code?

Immediately, and this is the detail that catches studios out at Christmas. The code is emailed to the recipient the moment the card is paid for. There is no send-on date, no scheduling, no gift message field and nothing printable to put in a card — the purchase form takes an amount, the recipient's email and the buyer's email, and that is the whole of it.

So the practical advice for a buyer who wants a surprise is to buy close to the day, or to buy it to their OWN address and forward it when they are ready. That second route works perfectly well and costs nothing, and it is worth spelling out on your gift page in one line, because it is the only way to control the timing.

• The recipient is emailed the code as soon as the payment succeeds.
• No message, no send date, no printable card, no physical card.
• A buyer wanting a surprise should buy to their own address and forward it.
• The receipt goes to the buyer; the code does not.

How does a recipient actually spend it?

They book a workshop as normal and type the code into the box on the booking form. Case and dashes do not matter. The card takes whatever it can off the total and they pay any remainder by card; if it covers the whole booking, there is no card payment at all. A card that has expired, been spent, or was bought in another currency is refused with one plain message rather than a diagnosis, which is deliberate — a per-reason error would turn the box into a way of testing whether stolen codes are live.

Refunds behave the way you would want. If a booking paid partly by card and partly by gift card is refunded, the cash goes back through the provider and the gift portion goes back ONTO the card, so the recipient has not lost the present because they could not make the date.

Where do I put the link?

On your own website, because bindro will not put it there for you. The gift-card shop lives at its own address for your studio, and no workshop page carries a "buy a gift card" button — if you want makers to find it, link it from your navigation, your footer, your Instagram bio and your December mailout.

It is worth treating that as a small piece of seasonal work rather than a setting. Studios that sell well at Christmas publish a gift page in early November with the amounts on it, and the ones that do not usually have the link buried where nobody looks.