thread Re: Issue Loading Gift Cards by Swiping in Payments Troubleshooting

Issue Loading Gift Cards by Swiping

amlove1974 — Sat, 20 Sep 2025 13:45:02 GMT

I am able to load gift cards my manually entering them into square; however, I should be able to swipe them to load them using the customer display, but it is not working. I thought maybe it was the customer display unit, so I entered the gift card manually to load it, charged my credit card (using the customer display chip reader), then paid using the gift card (by swiping) and it went through fine. The only issue is loading the gift card by swiping. How do I fix this?

Re: Issue Loading Gift Cards by Swiping

ashc — Fri, 28 Feb 2020 14:07:45 GMT

Hey @amlove1974 and welcome to the Community!

Can you tell me more about your setup? Like which of our hardware are you using?

Re: Issue Loading Gift Cards by Swiping

speckledsheep — Wed, 15 Sep 2021 17:25:13 GMT

I am having this issue too! this past summer we bought the square register because we were having so many issues with the mountain of updates that COVID brough around on our old I-pads. We have been liking hte customer display a lot but when we sell a gift card now we can only manually enter it... the customer display doesn't recognize us swiping the card to load it for some reason???

Re: Issue Loading Gift Cards by Swiping

_Violet — Thu, 16 Sep 2021 15:12:47 GMT

Hi @amlove1974 & @speckledsheep - Thanks for reaching out to us here on the Square Seller Community👋😊

Because our gift cards have a magstripe printed on the back of them, they are only able to be swiped and read by a magstripe card reader. This would be either through our Square Magstripe readers or the front of the Square Stand. The customer display on Square Register is built to read chips on credit cards.

I hope this information is helpful but please do let us know if you have any additional questions. Always happy to help! 😊