Sell Gift Vouchers: Money Now, Custom Later

A gift voucher is the only thing on your menu that you get paid for before you cook it.

For a restaurant or café, that is not a small thing. December sells January. A quiet Tuesday in February was paid for in November. And a meaningful share of vouchers are bought by somebody who has never eaten with you, for somebody who has.

Who it is for

Any venue where somebody might reasonably say "you should go there". Restaurants and cafés obviously, but also bakeries, delis, food trucks and anywhere with a Christmas problem and a February problem.

How it works

1. Create the voucher. Set the amounts you want to offer, whether there is bonus credit, and the terms. That is the whole setup.

2. The customer buys it on their phone. Either for themselves or as a gift for somebody they name. They pay Mosey, and the money goes to your Stripe account.

3. They redeem it in person. Staff apply it on the till or at the counter, and the balance comes down by what was spent. It can be used across several visits until it runs out, which is a better experience than the paper equivalent and, for you, usually a larger total spend.

Bonus credit, and why it works

You can give more credit than the customer pays. Pay €50, get €60 to spend.

The reason to do it is not generosity. It is that a voucher with bonus credit is a decision somebody makes now rather than later, and the gap between the two is where most voucher sales are lost. It also lifts the average: a buyer choosing between €50 and €100 tips towards the larger one when the larger one carries a better bonus.

You are giving away margin on food, not cash — €10 of bonus credit on a restaurant meal costs you the food cost of €10 of menu, not €10.

Choosing the amounts

Three is usually the right number of options, and the middle one is the one most people pick.

That is worth designing around rather than discovering. If you offer €25, €50 and €100, most buyers land on €50. If you offer €50, €75 and €150, most land on €75. The amounts you put on the screen do more to set your average voucher than anything you say about them.

Think about what the voucher is actually for. A café voucher is a run of mornings, so it wants to be small enough to feel casual. A restaurant voucher is usually dinner for two, so it should cover dinner for two — a voucher that leaves somebody €30 short is a voucher that produces an awkward evening and no second visit.

Where vouchers actually sell

Almost nowhere, unless somebody is reminded.

Vouchers are not a thing people browse for. They are bought in the ten days before Christmas, the week before a birthday, and the afternoon somebody realises they have forgotten an anniversary. The venues that sell them are the ones that mention them at exactly those moments.

The practical version: put the link in your social posts in December, mention them on the receipt, and have staff say the words when somebody asks whether you do gift cards. Every voucher has a link you can put anywhere, and it does not need the Mosey app to open.

What it costs

• 4.5% of the voucher value
• €1.29 booking fee, paid by the customer on top of the price, not by you

Nothing monthly, nothing per voucher created, nothing if you sell none.

A worked example

A restaurant sells 60 vouchers in December, averaging €75, with a "pay €75, get €85" bonus on offer.

That is €4,500 taken in December. Mosey's share is 4.5%, so €202.50, leaving €4,297.50 before Stripe's card fee, in the account before Christmas. The €1.29 booking fee on each of the 60 purchases is paid by the buyer, on top of the voucher.

Against that, the venue has committed to serve €5,100 of menu value. At a 30% food cost, that is roughly €1,530 of actual food, delivered across January and February when the dining room would otherwise be half empty.

The 14-day right, and your choice about it

A customer who buys a gift voucher has a statutory right to withdraw within 14 days. Mosey honours it directly rather than routing it through you, but only on facts that can be checked rather than judged:

• inside the 14 days, and
• completely unredeemed, and
• no waiver was given on that purchase, and
• for a gift, the recipient has not been told yet

If any of those is not true, it becomes an ordinary refund request and the decision is yours. Nothing is refunded over your head on a judgement call.

You can ask buyers to waive the right. Set your voucher refund policy to immediate access and a tick box appears at checkout. That is a decision each business should make rather than one Mosey should make for everybody, so the default is the safer one: the buyer keeps the right unless they were actually shown a box and ticked it.

The waiver is recorded against the individual purchase, not read from your current setting. Changing your policy later cannot retroactively strip the right from somebody who was never offered the choice.

What it connects to

Vouchers are one of four ways to take money before service, and they work best beside the others:

• Run a loyalty programme — free on every tier, and a voucher redemption counts as a visit
• The Mosey till — where a voucher is applied in person
• Take payments in store with Mosey Pay — 1.5% on the card half of the same counter
• Grow revenue with vouchers, promotions, events and memberships — how the four fit together
• What Mosey costs — every rate on one page