Major Retailer Gift Card APIs

Question

I was looking for which major retailers had gift card APIs.

For example Amazon has the Corporate Gift Card Program: http://www.amazon.com/gp/browse.html?node=165034011 where you can either buy a bulk amount of gift codes and then they can send you a CSV file that can be imported into a DB, or (if you spend enough) they have an API for gift codes on demand.

I was wondering if anyone can verify/deny if services exist for places like: iTunes
Best Buy
Barnes and Noble
Starbucks
Home Depot
Target
Visa
United Artists

Or is there a site/service that has a consolidated API for working with 3rd party gift card redemption with any of the above or similar type retailers? Preferably this would be done via web services/API calls with PHP.

Answer 1

check out Tango Card on Git Hub - everything you need is there

https://github.com/tangocarddev/

Answer 2

One possible solution might be to just use a pre-paid debit card.

Plastyc, offers a Visa-based debit-credit card that you access via an API.

The fine print (http://www.plastyc.com/documents.htm) indicates that there is a $5000 sign-up fee, which is a little unreasonable if you want to try something small. But it seems like there is also some kind of unclear process with the Amazon Corporate Gift Card signup. (i.e. not immediately available via AWS)

Would love to hear further general solutions to this type of problem.

I wonder if there is a way to take advantage of the fact that Paypal has a Debit/Credit card access feature for its users?

-ft

Answer 3

Just talked with Amazon Gift Card for corporate business and they require a 50k verified balance before they allow you access to their api and development team. In our case we are wanting to use gift card codes on-demand which would draw from the 50k as users create/pay for gift cards in our application. What this tells me is that they dont really have a fully functional api. The 50k is a mechanism to weed out the people who wont really do much with the api. But also they will need to customize their environment to work with your app. Just seems like its not really an api rather "show us your serious" then we will co-develope a solution for your specific need.