J
Joshua Rammacher
GHL shipped gift cards. That's great. But right now there's no API and no workflow actions to actually interact with them programmatically — which means the only thing you can do with gift cards is sell them manually or let customers buy them from a link.
That's the whole list. There's no way to issue a gift card through a workflow. No way to issue one through an external system via API. No way to check a contact's gift card balance. No way to mark a card redeemed. No way to retrieve a list of gift cards tied to a contact record. The gift card feature was shipped as a standalone sales tool and never connected to the rest of the platform.
Here's what that means in practice:
A business wants to automatically send a $25 gift card when a customer hits a VIP tag after their 5th appointment. Can't do it — no workflow action exists.
A business wants to issue a referral reward gift card when a referred customer pays in full for a service. Can't do it — nothing triggers gift card creation from a workflow or an external build.
An agency wants to build a loyalty points system where points convert to gift card credit after a threshold is hit. Can't do it — no API endpoint to create, query, or update gift cards.
A business running an external integration (Zapier, Make, a custom Cloudflare Worker, a third-party booking tool) wants to trigger a gift card when a condition is met inside their stack. Can't do it — no API exists.
A business wants to pull a report showing which customers have unredeemed gift card balances and send a "don't forget your credit" follow-up campaign. Can't do it — no way to query gift card data from workflow filters or external tools.
What's needed is a gift card API — a set of endpoints that let developers and the workflow engine interact with gift cards the same way they can interact with contacts, appointments, and invoices:
  • Issue a gift card to a contact (amount, code, expiration)
  • Retrieve gift cards by contact ID
  • Check balance on a specific gift card
  • Mark a gift card as redeemed or adjust its balance
  • List all gift cards in an account with filter options (issued, redeemed, expired, balance range)
On the workflow side, the same operations should be available as workflow actions:
  • "Issue Gift Card" action (amount, recipient contact, message)
  • "Check Gift Card Balance" action (for conditional branching)
The infrastructure is already built. The gift card system exists. This is just exposing it so the rest of GHL — and the developers building on GHL — can actually use it.
The business cases that unlock immediately once this API exists:
Referral programs: Issue a gift card automatically when a referred customer completes and pays for a service. The referrer gets rewarded without the business doing anything manually, and the reward stays inside the business instead of going out as cash.
Loyalty programs: Issue gift cards automatically at milestone appointments (5th visit, 1 year as a customer, $1,000 in lifetime spend). Fully automated, zero manual work.
Win-back campaigns: Issue a small gift card to a contact who hasn't booked in 90 days. Trigger from a workflow, send via SMS or email, track whether they came back and used it.
Apology/recovery workflows: When a complaint tag is added to a contact, auto-issue a gift card as a goodwill gesture while the team follows up.
Reward campaigns: Run a promotion where any customer who books a service during a specific window automatically receives a gift card for their next visit — all triggered via workflow with zero manual issuance.
The gift card system is already built. Connect it to the API and the workflow engine and it becomes one of the most powerful retention and referral tools on the platform. Right now it's a dead end. It should be a lever.