Quick Shopping Cart Gift Certificates.

Many people requested gift cards as an option within their store. Although we have this on our road map, it's not going to come in time for the holidays.

One of the challenges to providing a store for different business models is to give features generic names, which may belie its underlying ability. One such area is our coupons feature, accessible through the Site Promotion menu, which we can use to create a gift certificate that works as a gift card.

I'm not going to pretend this is a full gift card implementation, but we've found that this system works for some of our owners, and, at the very least, we can kick off a discussion on how a future gift card system might function.

When you get down to it, a gift card is a unique coupon. With an additional piece of manual processing, it's quite easy to create a single use gift card that fulfills most requirements for a gift card to redeem within your store. I'm not going to go into how you create and disseminate the coupon, for example, you create a product called Gift Certificates and include attributes that define the values you want to offer, and then the user provides any personalization within the “special instructions” box during checkout. You can print the coupon and mail it to the recipient.What matters is this: the user has the certificate, it can be used one time, and, if it gets lost, you can deactivate it prior to issuing a substitute, should you be so inclined.

Add the coupon.

Assign a unique code. The more obscure, the better, but try to stick to characters that aren’t easy to confuse, such as O and 0. For example, use Whee-23-12. Within the description, use either the specific person, or, if you have general coupons that anyone can redeem, use something more suitable. I strongly suggest adding the recipient’s name, where possible, to make it easy to search for a lost coupon.

Set this coupon to active, fill in the amount requested, and check on the minimum purchase. For a certificate, this is usually “not required.” How happy would you be to receive a discount coupon versus a gift certificate? Same mechanism, same paper, but nowhere near the same effect.

Set the dates for which you want this to be active. Your local state may have specific rules for these, so, before restricting this range, find out what's permissible. Now for the important part, set the Maximum number of uses to one. If you want to add notes on the circumstance of the sale, do so, and then save the coupon. Next, get this coupon, er, gift certificate, to the user, and they can shop to their heart’s content.

Management:

What if it goes missing?

To look up the name it was issued to, use the search feature within the coupon section. We're assuming they don't have the code, since they could just use that. When you've located the coupon, check that it has not been activated, and set the coupon to inactive prior to creating another one. The old coupon is now worth the paper it was printed on.

Can they use a partial Gift Certificate?

While there's no automatic process for this scenario, here are a couple of suggestions on how to accommodate such. If the buyer adds $15 to the cart and pays with a $25 certificate then they will have a shortfall. You can avoid this situation by setting the coupon to require a minimum amount equal to the gift certificate. Or, process the certificate and create a new one for the remainder.

Hopefully, this entry falls into the same category. Please let us know if you have success with this idea or if you've created a different workflow.