The Scenario
Holiday season. 50 VIP customers are getting gift cards — amounts vary by spend tier, everything is already mapped in an Excel workbook: amount in column A, customer email in column B. The email campaign goes out Tuesday. The gift card codes need to be in the merge file Monday night.
The marketing coordinator tried creating the first five gift cards in the Shopify admin. 5 cards took 12 minutes. She has 50 to go and a Monday night deadline.
The bad version:
- Open Shopify's gift card section, click Issue gift card, set the amount, enter the customer email, save, note the last four digits.
- Copy the last four digits into the workbook next to the correct customer row.
- 50 times. With a real risk of mis-pairing a code with the wrong customer row if the copy-paste sequence gets disrupted.
The email merge runs Monday at 10 PM. Every code needs to be in the workbook before that.
The Easy Way: One Prompt in SheetXAI
SheetXAI is an AI agent that lives inside your Excel workbook. It reads the gift card amounts and customer emails, creates each Shopify gift card via the API, and writes the gift card ID and last four digits back into the workbook — in the correct row, every time.
Read my VIP Rewards Excel sheet and create one Shopify gift card per row using the amount in column B, then write the new gift card ID into column C
What You Get
- A Shopify gift card created for each row, with the customer email in column A assigned to the card.
- The gift card ID written back into column C for each created card.
- The marketing coordinator has all 50 gift card IDs ready for the email merge without any manual tracking.
What If the Data Is Not Quite Ready
The last four digits of each code are needed for personalization, not the full ID
Read my VIP Rewards Excel sheet and create Shopify gift cards for each row using amount in column B and customer email in column A — write the gift card ID into column C and the last 4 digits into column D
Gift cards need an expiry date 90 days from today
Read my VIP Rewards Excel sheet and create Shopify gift cards for each row — use amount in column B and customer email in column A — set expires_on to 90 days from today — write the gift card ID into column C
Amounts are in a non-standard format — some have currency symbols, some are text
Read my VIP Rewards Excel sheet and create Shopify gift cards for each row — treat the value in column B as a number (strip currency symbols and commas) — use customer email in column A — write the gift card ID into column C
Normalize amounts, set expiry, skip already-created rows, and write ID and last-four
For each row in my VIP Rewards Excel sheet where column C is blank, create a Shopify gift card using amount in column B (stripped of currency formatting) and customer email in column A — set expires_on 90 days from today — write the gift card ID into column C and last 4 digits into column D
Running the amount normalization and expiry logic inline means the gift cards are created correctly the first time without a separate data cleaning step.
Try It
Get the 7-day free trial of SheetXAI and open the VIP rewards workbook before Monday's email merge, then ask SheetXAI to create all 50 gift cards and write the codes back. Future loyalty campaigns will start from the same workbook structure. Also worth reading: how to bulk create discount codes for a different type of promotion, or the hub overview for all Shopify workflows.