We've made significant improvements to the engine behind your gift card and voucher sales. This update focuses on making the entire purchase experience faster, more reliable, and more resilient. For the majority of users voucher payments worked as intended, but this update is designed to capture more fringe cases to ensure no matter their network stablity, stripe issues or 3rd party email issues - the voucher will get to them.
Faster checkout experience
The voucher purchase flow is now significantly faster. Design image generation and email delivery have been moved to intelligent background processing, meaning your customers see their confirmation screen
almost instantly after payment — no more waiting on slow rendering steps. Everything happens seamlessly behind the scenes.
Bulletproof payment handling
We've rebuilt how payments are processed to eliminate any possibility of amount mismatches. The payment total is now always calculated server-side from the live basket contents — if a customer adds or
removes a voucher, any existing payment session is automatically cancelled and replaced with an accurate one. You might see more 'cancelled' payments in Stripe as the customer edits their basket. This prevents stale charges that may happen if the user is using the session on multiple tabs and ensures your customers are always charged the correct amount.
Guaranteed voucher delivery
Previously, a temporary issue with image generation could prevent a voucher from being created, even after payment succeeded. We've completely restructured this — voucher records and codes are now created
and confirmed before any image processing begins. Your customers will always receive their voucher code and confirmation email, guaranteed. The design image follows moments later in the background. This is important for those of you who use custom HTML or custom designs that may be invalid.
Smarter email delivery
Voucher and receipt emails now automatically retry with increasing delays if the first attempt doesn't go through, rather than giving up after a single try. This dramatically reduces the chance of a customer
missing their email due to a temporary mail server hiccup (on the customers end)
Built-in safety net
We've introduced an automatic recovery system that continuously monitors for any purchase where payment was taken but delivery didn't complete. If it detects one, it verifies the payment directly with Stripe
and completes the fulfilment automatically. This acts as a catch-all safety net — even in scenarios we haven't anticipated, your customers' vouchers will be delivered.
Seamless handling of concurrent requests
When a customer's browser and our payment processor both try to confirm the same order at the same time (which can happen with certain payment methods), the system now handles this gracefully. No more false
error messages — the customer always sees a successful result. This happens in rare cases where the user has multiple tabs open of the same voucher basket, and then drops connection during payment.
New storage infrastructure
Voucher design images are now served from our new high-performance Hetzner storage, delivering faster load times and improved reliability when your customers view or download their voucher designs.
