Lauren from Pure Indulgence (Australia) approached me me with an interesting problem.
The company sell gift cards through their Shopify store, but required the ability for their customers to print a physical version that that could be brought to their physical locations and substituted for credit using their in-store POS system (not Shopify POS).
Historically Pure Indulgence has operated only as a bricks and mortar business but in May 2025, they starting selling both products and in-person services via a Shopify website.
This left them with two systems:
- The In-store System: Gift voucher generated in-store, redeemed in the same store using the same system
- The Shopify System: Gift vouchers generated online, redeemed in the store by manually deactivating the Shopify-bought gift card in Shopify
The goal of this particular project was to make the gift voucher purchased online match better with the in-store voucher experience.
The requirement was for a printable copy of the voucher to be generated but with a very particular design requirement, ruling out the possibility of simply printing the Shopify-generated gift card email.
At first, I was going to create an integrated Shopify app but given the risks associated with gift cards, I built a stateless PDF generator that reads only the information sent via the regular Shopify gift card emails.
When the customer receives their gift card email from Shopify, they click a button to generate a printable version. The email passes the required data through query parameters, the PDF is generated instantly, and nothing is stored.
The code remains with the customer - exactly how Shopify intended.
After several rounds of testing in a development store, we rolled the solution out in March 2026.