For many years, Chatham Marketplace has utilized a gift card program provided by National Co-op Grocers (NCG). NCG has administered a “shared value” gift card program for it’s members through one of their payment processing partners, FIS. Like many co-ops that use FIS, Chatham Marketplace also elected to join the gift card program, in part because of the “shared value” benefit, wherein a gift card sold at one participating co-op can be redeemed at another participating co-op.
In May of 2022, NCG announced to it’s members, their intention to sunset the gift card program. This announcement came at a time when our store was transitioning to a new payment processor – away from FIS – and we made the decision to get ahead of the system-wide change and move to our own branded gift cards.
While we loved the “shared value” aspect of the old program, we recognized this feature was largely unused and believe that an internal gift card program will provide a higher quality experience for our gift card customers.
Shoppers that have a Co-op branded gift card need to use up their remaining funds or transfer them to a new gift card before December 31, 2022. After that time, we will only be accepting our new gift cards at checkout. While we will have access to card balances after that time, it will be a cumbersome process and won’t be able to happen at the time of checkout.
