In today’s world, where 49% of employees will consider leaving if they are dissatisfied with the benefits and rewards they are getting, something as simple as knowing how to organize bulk Visa gift cards for employees can help you retain your best talent.
Why is retaining your best talent important?
For one thing, it costs between 1.5X and 2X of an employee’s salary to replace them, according to Gallup. If this is true for any employee, consider the costs to replace your best talent.
Prepaid cards have become one popular way to reward employees and keep them happy.
They are flexible (employees can spend them in any store), customizable, reloadable (for continuous reward incentives), accessible (no need to have a bank account), and easy to administer.
However, reaping the benefits of prepaid cards for employee rewards requires that you use a platform where you can:
- Easily and conveniently buy bulk Visa gift cards for employees
- Quickly send gift cards to employees
- Send gift cards to employees in different countries
- Easily install its API on your web and mobile platforms
In this article, we will show why the Reloadly platform is appropriate for employee incentives programs and how you can bulk purchase gift cards to reward your employees. We’ll cover:
- Why you should buy bulk gift cards for employees on Reloadly
- Why you should use prepaid gift cards for employee incentives
- How to buy bulk gift cards for employees on Reloadly
[Do you want to use prepaid debit cards for your employee rewards campaigns? Sign up for Reloadly to buy them in bulk and enjoy interesting discounts.]
1. Why you should buy bulk gift cards for employees using Reloadly
We offer a wide variety of cards
Though Visa prepaid debit cards (or open-loop gift cards) have become a popular gifting option and can be used in both online and physical stores, there is no reason why you should restrict your employees to that option.
What if one of your best talents prefers Mastercard or American Express prepaid cards? With Reloadly, you can find a wide variety of open-loop gift cards including Visa, MasterCard, and American Express.
Though open-loop gift cards are often preferred to closed-loop gift cards (that can only be used in the retailer’s store) for employee rewards (see below), some of your employee appreciation programs may require that you use closed-loop gift cards from Amazon, Starbucks, Spotify, among others.
Reloadly also provides a wide variety of closed-loop gift cards, thus providing multiple gift card options for employees.
We provide access to over 14,000 virtual cards from over 300 brands (including the most popular ones). And for each card, you can buy in bulk.
You can customize our prepaid debit cards
The beauty of prepaid debit cards is that you can customize predesigned cards with your brand identities (company name, company logo, etc.) and card designs. Doing this will improve brand awareness, present a positive brand image, and help you retain employees as it can deepen their emotional connection to your brand.
In addition, you can add personalized messages to the gift cards you are sending to your employees to reiterate your appreciation for the value they are providing. These messages can turn standard cards into unique gift cards for employees.
We complete bulk orders in seconds
On Reloadly, bulk orders are not different from single orders in terms of processing speed. We complete bulk orders in a few seconds (not hours or 2-3 business days).
Endless discount offerings are available
Bulk orders can help you reward multiple employees at once. This is especially important if you are a big company with hundreds or thousands of employees.
But what if you can even save costs while at it?
At Reloadly, we offer discounts on bulk purchases so you can save costs even while meeting your needs.
Send egift cards to employees across the globe
If you are a global brand with employees and gig workers across the globe, then you need a platform where you can send bulk gift cards to people in different locations.
With Reloadly, you can send gift cards in 100 different currencies. This will ensure that your workers can spend them in stores that are specific to their locations (instead of looking for stores that accept dollars).
You can also pay for bulk corporate gift card purchases through multiple payment methods, including Stripe and PayPal.
Easy integration to your platforms
As we will see below, our API can be easily integrated into your web and mobile platforms in just a day. We have made the process so simple that you won’t require much technical know-how to get it up and running.
Central management of prepaid cards
Unlike closed-loop gift cards, prepaid cards need to be managed. For example, if you are doing another gift card program, you can just reload the prepaid card you have already given to employees instead of buying new ones.
To do this, you need a central platform where you can conduct account management – manage and reload cards. We provide such a platform at Reloadly.
2. Why you should use prepaid gift cards for employee incentives
Before considering how to buy gift cards or gift certificates for employees, let’s highlight why many have come to prefer prepaid cards to closed-loop cards.
- Flexibility: A Target gift card can only be spent in a Target store. But what if some of your employees don’t fancy Target? An open-loop gift card is the perfect gift in this scenario as it removes the hassle of trying to select a particular retailer’s card. They can be used in any store that ordinarily accepts debit cards and credit cards.
- Customizability: As we have seen, customizing has many branding and employee retention advantages.
You can reload the card when you are doing general employee appreciation or when you are rewarding certain employees for specific achievements (sales targets met or exceeded, years spent in service, etc.).
If you give holiday gifts to workers, you can also do it by reloading their prepaid cards.
Other advantages of prepaid gift cards include:
- No bank account required: If you have some employees or gig workers in places where it is difficult to open bank accounts, prepaid gift cards can come in handy. Unlike traditional debit cards, they do not need to be connected to a bank account.
- Fraud prevention: Should an employee lose the card or it falls into the hands of fraudsters, you can disable the card from the central platform. This makes it easier to prevent fraud.
3. How to buy bulk gift cards for employees on Reloadly
How to integrate our API
Integrating our API to your mobile and web platforms is easy and can be completed in a day. Below are two key things you need to do:
Get the prerequisites ready
Before integration can be completed, you need to put the following in place:
- Prepare the application/flow on your end to trigger the campaign.
- Setup campaign details: start and end date, campaign name.
- Define eligibility criteria: who can receive the bonus or the reward.
- Sign up to get a Reloadly account
- Retrieve your API credentials, such as client_id and client_secret from the Developers section.
- Download Reloadly’s Postman collection so you can have more hands on the API and necessary endpoints to be used. Reloadly uses rest API.
Known how to obtain access tokens
Everything you will do on the Reloadly platform requires an access token. Therefore, you must learn how to obtain access tokens before you can bulk purchase gift cards for team members or employees.
To get access tokens, you will need to have your API credentials ((client_id and client_secret) at hand. Once you have them, use the “Access Token” request in the Postman collection to obtain an access token, as seen below:
How to buy bulk Visa gift cards for employees on Reloadly
You can buy bulk gift cards on the Reloadly platform by following these steps:
Get the list of available gift cards
The “GET Products” API call will show you a list of all the gift cards available on our platform. Below is an example of a gift card and all its accompanying details:
Identify the product ID of Visa debit cards
You can go through the list to identify all the gift card options for employees.
If Visa prepaid cards are your preference, you can note the product IDs of all the Visa prepaid cards on our platform.
When you are ready to bulk purchase gift cards, you can then search for the Visa prepaid card of interest through the product ID, as seen below:
There is also an option to search by country, using the “GET Countries” endpoint. This is important if you are rewarding international employees. When you search by the country’s ISO code, you will see a list of all the cards that you can send to that country (in its currency).
Below is a sample result of a country search:
Create and fulfill bulk orders
You will need to use the “POST Order” API call to create bulk orders. Below is an example of what this looks like:
On the left-hand side is the information you need to supply for this bulk gift card order. Instead of “1” in this example, you can set the quantity to 50 (if you are a small business) or 1,000 (if you are a large business) for bulk purchases. “Unit price” is the value or denomination of each card. This can be $10, $50, or $100, among other options.
Also, instead of a single email address in this example, you will need to input the email addresses of all recipients. “Sender Name” is the name that the recipient will see as the sender of the card.
Before sending the reward cards, you will also need to retrieve the redemption codes through the “GET Redeem Codes” endpoint. As seen below, this will provide you with the “cardNumber” and “pinCode” associated with the cards.
Note that the process is similar if you want to use more gift card options for employees – Amazon, Starbucks, Apple, or other closed-loop cards. Learning how to send Amazon gift cards follows the same process as sending bulk Visa prepaid cards.
One major difference is that closed-loop gift cards usually have expiration dates that will be part of the redemption instructions sent to cardholders.
Get transaction details
On the right-hand side of the “POST Order” endpoint are the transaction details, as seen below:
You can check the transaction status in real-time, the total fee charged for the bulk order, and the discounts you have enjoyed on the order, among others.
Start buying bulk Visa gift cards for employees on Reloadly
Prepaid debit cards can help you reward your employees and make them feel that you value them. This will not only lead them to stay but it will make them more engaged and motivated, improve their wellness, and enhance their productivity.
With Reloadly, you can buy a variety of prepaid cards in bulk at discounted rates, deliver them in a few seconds, customize them with your brand identities, manage them from a central platform, and send them to employees across the globe.
We have also streamlined the integrating process to make it easy to get started. In a day, you can start implementing your employee rewards programs. And if you face any problem, our customer service team is always at hand to help and make the process as seamless as possible.
[Do you want to start buying bulk gift cards for employees to reward them for their service and achievement? Sign up for Reloadly to do this in a quick, cost-effective, and convenient way.]
