A gift card gets sent to CardCash and it gets sorted by the receiving department.

It gets slapped with a CardCash barcode and the balance is verified so a customer will get what they are expecting.

Until a couple of months ago, the process would continue as the card would be put into a secure room and sorted into a system until a customer would order it. When an order would come in, the process would begin once again in reverse. The correct card would be removed from it’s place, scanned and shipped out. This was a smooth process, but it was done manually.

When Kevin Landsberg joined the innovation at CardCash a couple of years ago, the first thing he wanted to know is why this process can’t be automated. The answer? It was never done yet. No one had the unique needs of a secondary gift card market and the amount of volume that CardCash has.

We love new ideas so we gave it a try…

A couple of years later the cardinator moved into the new CardCash warehouse.

What is the Cardinator?

It’s first purpose is to organize and safely store all gift cards.

It’s second and main purpose is to process all the orders and ship out the card to the customer.This is all done with the push of the start button.

What’s different with the new Cardinator?

A card comes in the mail and gets sorted and a barcode with tracking gets added to the card.

Now comes the fun part!

The Cardinator has 4 carousels that store all the physical gift cards. There are over 7,500 slots to hold gift cards in each carousel. Chutes are attached to the outer layer of the machine for ease of placement.

2 Modes of Operations

A: Insertion Mode: There is a special barcode attached to the machine.

When you scan a gift card the carousel turns to an open slot in the machine and lights up.

B: Fulfillment Mode: When orders come in, the Cardinator gets put into “fulfillment mode”. The sophisticated internal computer ‘reads’ the orders and uses a special air knife to shoot the correct card out to the awaiting shipping basket.

Each carousel is working in unison to fulfill the customer’s entire order.

The Numbers:

30,000 physical gift cards in the Cardinator

7,500 physical gift cards per carousel

4 carousels

40 tries to shoot out the card

Keep posted for more videos of the Cardinator in action!

What would you like to see?