Buying an eGift Card for Christmas: Nath: 'Hey Woolies, I wish to purchase a gift card on your site, but want to delay the gift until Christmas morning. Can this be done?' Woolies: 'Of course not. If you buy a gift card at 2am, we send a text message to your recipient at 2am. They clearly want this gift right now!'
I'm not going crazy, right? It's a super obvious thing when buying a gift card that the person buying the gift would want to specify a delivery date/time as well as a recipient yeah? I told my work colleague and he reckons I'm an edge case. Most customers would want the gift sent immediately. Even if I wanted it same-day, I'd want the option to send it during waking hours.
If you're bored try chatting with their online support as a side task and raise this as an issue. They'll stay typing away as long as you keep talking.
My most recent one was asking them to disable 2FA on my woolies account because it doesn't keep my devices logged in. I mean NetBank doesn't have 2FA yet I need my mobile any time either one of us logs in to woolies? Like I really don't care if someone can see that I cook too many curries at my address. Support person spent about 45 mins with me (I gave them positive feedback, but no they can't fix my account's 2FA everytime or remove 2FA altogether).
You might get them to raise a feature request for you?
Failing that you could script it to buy the gift card at the time you want, maybe even sell that as a service to other users?
The 2FA on the Oporto app is obscene. You're logged out every time you launch it, need to enter a text message code to log back in, you get a text and email saying you logged in. Bro I was checking for cheap chicken strips and chips, not accessing the nuclear codes.
As someone who is in tech this made me actually laugh. That's absolutely utterly ridiculous, but I understand why those engineers were forced to should implement that.
I'm no longer working but my background is tech too, I think it's because they have a "save this card for next time" so there's a bit extra needed to for the payment gateway to let you *store card tokens. I suspect they've gone a bit beyond the basic requirements though...
Yeah that'll be why (for ref I've actually architected and built something similar to what you're referring to for a product you may have used). What they've done is still over kill though. The first thing someone should've asked is "do we really need this feature?".
None of my cards are saved by a site when an out of the box Google solution does the same thing backed with biometrics. That app can't compete in that feature space and only exposes users to security risks. I'm betting that costs them millions of dollars to implement and then has cost at least a million to maintain so far all for something to expedite a payment process that could already be expedited whilst also introducing tons risk on their side and a degraded and frustrating user experience.
Failing that you could script it to buy the gift card at the time you want, maybe even sell that as a service to other users?
Alas, the promotion I was making use of ends on Dec 20. So that method won't work. It's a good idea, though.
Not sure how such a site would handle payments for the gift cards, though? I sure wouldn't want to be collecting credit card details and passing them through to Woolies via some API. Any API they have (if they have one) is unlikely to accept payments. It sounds like it'd be less work to make a competing egift card site.
Woolies will not have an API for this, therefore you have two options, you could do both.
a) Schedule the payment from their card (encryption is easy) and charge a % processing fee, declined payments are charged at y% and no gift card is distributed.
b) Take the payment immediately and hold it in an offshore companies account with one of your subsidiary companies. Sched the payment from that account.
You could offer both, but with b) you get the fun of having their money in your third cousin's business account in Belize to turn that $100 gift card for their gran into $200 before buying buying the gift card and distributing it on time.
If that fails your third cousin's company can go bankrupt I guess. Shame for them, I'm ure they'll land on their feet in their next company.
On the implementation, any website can be scraped / populated with bare basics, so you'd just have to set up a schedule to actually do that to be a legit business without needing to have to get buy in from stores on accepting your special new fooCard.