A gift card sounds like a small feature — until you try to sell one in Saudi Arabia through WooCommerce.
Mohammed Hafash runs Drive7, a luxury car care service — premium detailing and protection for expensive cars, with a brand built around doing things properly. He came to us on Upwork with a clear idea: let customers buy a gift card online, have it land on the recipient's phone, and let branch staff redeem it by code.
The idea was simple. The market made it hard:
Nothing off the shelf covered even half of that list. So we built it.
We built the whole thing as one WordPress plugin on top of the store's existing WooCommerce checkout, so payment kept working through the gateways Saudi customers already use — Tamara, Tabby and Ottu — and no money ever moved through code we had written ourselves.
The gift page at drive7.com/gift is a four-step Arabic form built with custom Elementor widgets: pick an amount (preset or custom), enter sender and recipient details, write a message, then choose how and when the gift arrives — WhatsApp or SMS, now or scheduled for a birthday morning. When payment succeeds, the plugin generates a unique gift code, builds a branded PDF voucher, emails the buyer, and sends the recipient their gift.
Delivery is where most of the real work went. Meta quietly drops WhatsApp templates it classifies as marketing — the API says accepted, the phone shows nothing — so we reworded the message as a transactional utility template, which Meta delivers reliably. The SMS gateway, Unifonic, rejects requests from any server address not on its allowlist, and the server was going out over IPv6 while only its IPv4 address was approved, so the plugin now forces IPv4. It also reads the gateway's response body rather than trusting the HTTP status, because Unifonic returns 200 even for failed sends.
Anything that does fail is visible instead of lost: every send attempt is logged, and the order moves to a Gift Pending Delivery status so staff can spot it and deliver manually. The gift's whole life — pending, sent, redeemed, expired — lives as custom statuses in the normal WooCommerce orders screen, staff redeem codes from a dashboard in the admin, and every order is mirrored into a Google Sheet the team can watch, pushed after checkout so the customer never waits on it.
Gift cards now sell and deliver themselves. From payment to voucher to the message on the recipient's phone, nobody at Drive7 touches the process.
What the plugin handles on its own:
The numbers behind that: 100% of WhatsApp and SMS notifications are reaching recipients. And if a send ever does fail, it surfaces on the order instead of disappearing — the difference between a gift arriving and an awkward call from a customer whose present never showed up.
The build took two weeks from brief to launch — see our custom application development service for how we scope work like this. The system is live at drive7.com/gift.
Tell us about it. We will tell you honestly whether we are the right team, what it would cost, and how long it would take.