How To - Loyalty & Gift Card Production

The purpose of this guide is to offer advice about the production of cards for use with iZone Loyalty or Gift platform. Zonal does not produce cards but this guide provides information that will help you order compatible cards for your loyalty or gift card program.

Card Printing Format

All cards should be produced as a Standard Mag strip card. The front of the card design can range massively from a simple printed card number to fully embossed cards with UV printing; the design is totally up to you but generally more features lead to a higher cost per card.

It is recommended that the card number is printed on the front of the card as well as encoded on the mag swipe, as this means that staff can fall back to typing the card number if required.

HiCo & LoCo

'HiCo' and 'LoCo' does not refer to the amount or type of data that a card can carry, but rather how secure and durable they are. Both card types can be encoded with the same amount of data and are both compatible with iZone Loyalty or Gift Cards.

The key difference between the two is that HiCo magnetic stripe cards are encoded with a stronger magnetic field that makes them more suitable for secure applications and those where the cards must be frequently swiped. With HiCo cards, encoded data is less likely to be erased when exposed to an outside magnetic field. This leads to longer card life and keeps card information well-protected. HiCo magnetic stripe cards are popular for such applications as credit and debit cards, access control, employee IDs, and library cards.

LoCo magnetic stripe cards are ideal for short-term applications where high security and long-lasting card life are less of a concern. The magnetic stripes on these cards are more of a brownish hue, while HiCo mag stripes are almost black in colour. LoCo cards use a lower intensity magnetic field and are used for a variety of applications including hotel room keys, theme park passes, and many more.

Either is compatible with iZone, but some consideration should be made to how long the expected life of the card will be; shorter life cards that are used infrequently can be LoCo, but regularly used cards that are used over many years should really be HiCo.

QR Codes

It is recommended that you include the full card number as a QR code on the back of the card. This then means that the cards are futureproofed for use during iServe or QR code scanners at the point of sale. The QR code should have a strong white border around the code so that the scanners can clearly see the code. Generally, the bigger the code the easier it is to scan.

QR codes should be encoded to the ISO/IEC 18004 standard. Version 1 symbol is recommended as it has the best readability and can hold up to 16 Alphanumeric or 27 Numeric characters with a decent level of error correction

Card Numbers

We recommend that the loyalty / gift platform generates all card numbers. This means that prefixes and check digits can be generated in the loyalty platform. We can provide an export of all the full card numbers in a CSV file for the card producer to use. We generally recommend a card number of 10 – 16 digits long, which is made up for three part - a prefix, number range and a check digit.

For example:

Prefix	Number range	Check Digit
145	00000001	4

The full card number is 145000000014.

This prefix is used by Aztec to determine the route that the card number should take, either to the gift card or loyalty platform.

Each program should generally have a different prefix. A prefix of 2 to 4 digits gives enough options to generate many card number ranges for many programs. The number range generally starts at 0 and increments up, and the number of digits in the range determines how many cards can be produced in that range, e.g. using 4 digits = a max of 9999 numbers.

A number range of 6 to 8 digits gives enough range for most programs with redundancy if needed.

The check digit is generated by entering the Prefix and the Number range though the Luhn algorithm, and is generally used to prevent accidental errors and to avoid people from guessing the next card number.

Card PINs

When cards are generated in the loyalty / Gift platform a PIN number is also generated. This is pseudo-randomly generated and assigned to the card number. It is mainly used for gift cards to check their balance online within the gift card balance widget. Sometimes the PIN number is printed on the reverse of the gift card, either in smaller print or under a scratch panel. Be aware that having this added to a card can increase the cost of card production, and it is our finding that many guests do not check their gift card balance online.