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Looking to start a close loop gift card business that would be bought in stores and redeemed online on our site.
Closed-loop gift card system, just like any payment card system, involves two parts: issuing and acquiring. So, you need some entity to issue the cards and another entity that would be able to accept these cards (i.e. process respective transactions). You can actually develop a system to issue cards from scratch (i.e., develop software to program and read cards, and purchase hardware to physically manufacture them). Usually, this takes time and money, so it might be better to turn to some entity that already issues cards. Many developers, actually, sell white-label brandable gift cards, so this might me an option. Plus there are companies specializing on gift card issuance.
When it comes to accpetance of gift cards at the stores, we should note that the stores have to be integrated with the gateway or payment platform that can accept your cards. You can, again, develop the platform yourself, or find a ready-made platform(s) with which the merchants are already integrated, and convince them to support your new gift cards.
You could actually, use UniPay Gateway platform. It does not have the issuing component in place (for this you will have to involve some third party). On the other hand, you can easily add support for new type of gift cards to UniPay Gateway logic. Also, you can use it as the basic gateway for new customers that want to integrate with you and support your gift cards. Besides that, UniPay is already iused by a lot of merchants, so integrating with the platform would make it possible for them to handle your gift cards.
