Gift Certificates
- By Chris Boulton
- Published 12/22/2007
- StoreSuite Updates
-
Rating:
Interspire StoreSuite NX 1.0 is now declared as feature complete for our initial release. The last feature remaining was support for sending and redeeming gift certificates via your store and today I'd like to give you an overview of how the gift certificate system works.
The gift certificate feature allows your customers to purchase and send gift certificates to recipients via email for things such as birthdays, Christmas, celebrations etc. When a customer visits the store, clicking on "Gift Certificates" will take them to a page where they can customize a gift certificate for a particular recipient and then add it to their cart.
As you can see, we've added in support for multiple themes to gift certificates. As a store administrator you can customize which gift certificates are available as well as completely customize the existing ones or add your own. We've added a few in by default to help you get started.
Once a gift certificate has been customized it is added to the customer's cart and they can continue shopping throughout the store until they're ready to pay for their order. Once an order is placed containing one or more gift certificates one of two things will happen:
To redeem a gift certificate for an order customers visit the "View Cart" page and enter their gift certificate code in to "Redeem Gift Certificate" box on the right. Multiple gift certificates can be redeemed per order and Interspire StoreSuite NX will apply the gift certificates in the order of least remaining balance to greatest remaining balance - that way customers will not end up with amounts such as $0.10 left on their gift certificates where possible.
Upon viewing the cart again, the customer will see a list of gift certificates applied to their cart under the subtotal. From this point the customer can also see how much was subtracted from this gift certificate, the remaining balance on the gift certificate after the order is placed and the adjusted total for the order (how much they still need to pay). Gift certificates can also be removed from the order.
The checkout process is performed as usual and the customer is only redirected to a payment provider if they still have an outstanding balance on their order after gift certificates have been applied.
On the administration side of things once again we're bringing a powerful interface for managing gift certificates purchased. You can create multiple views such as "Gift Certificates Expiring Today" and "Gift Certificates With Over $200 Remaining" as well as perform advanced searches. Changing the status of a gift certificate is as easy as selecting a new status using the status select box and viewing the complete history of a gift certificate (such as which orders it has been used for) is as easy as expanding the gift certificate with the + icon.
There's quite a few settings available for configuring the gift certificates feature.
So there you have it, an overview of the gift certificates functionality we've built in to Interspire StoreSuite NX. As you can see, it's quite powerful for the initial release and we'll hopefully build upon after the initial release of StoreSuite to implement any other feature requests or changes you may have.
As I mentioned previously, Interspire StoreSuite is now feature complete for the 1.0 release. From now on we'll be doing a lot of documentation and internal testing. Mitch will be posting an overview and contacting beta testers within a few weeks to organise the private beta testing phase.
From myself and Mitch, as well as the rest of the Interspire team, I want to take this opportunity to wish you all a very Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year and thank you for your loyal support over 2007.
The gift certificate feature allows your customers to purchase and send gift certificates to recipients via email for things such as birthdays, Christmas, celebrations etc. When a customer visits the store, clicking on "Gift Certificates" will take them to a page where they can customize a gift certificate for a particular recipient and then add it to their cart.
As you can see, we've added in support for multiple themes to gift certificates. As a store administrator you can customize which gift certificates are available as well as completely customize the existing ones or add your own. We've added a few in by default to help you get started.
Once a gift certificate has been customized it is added to the customer's cart and they can continue shopping throughout the store until they're ready to pay for their order. Once an order is placed containing one or more gift certificates one of two things will happen:
- If the order was paid for using payment gateway and the payment was received successfully then the gift certificates will be sent out via email as attachments to all of the recipients.
- If the order was paid for using a payment gateway that said the payment is still awaiting approval or the customer paid with an offline payment method, the gift certificates are placed on hold until the order status is set to either Completed or Shipped. The gift certificates are then emailed out to each of the recipients.
To redeem a gift certificate for an order customers visit the "View Cart" page and enter their gift certificate code in to "Redeem Gift Certificate" box on the right. Multiple gift certificates can be redeemed per order and Interspire StoreSuite NX will apply the gift certificates in the order of least remaining balance to greatest remaining balance - that way customers will not end up with amounts such as $0.10 left on their gift certificates where possible.Upon viewing the cart again, the customer will see a list of gift certificates applied to their cart under the subtotal. From this point the customer can also see how much was subtracted from this gift certificate, the remaining balance on the gift certificate after the order is placed and the adjusted total for the order (how much they still need to pay). Gift certificates can also be removed from the order.
The checkout process is performed as usual and the customer is only redirected to a payment provider if they still have an outstanding balance on their order after gift certificates have been applied.
On the administration side of things once again we're bringing a powerful interface for managing gift certificates purchased. You can create multiple views such as "Gift Certificates Expiring Today" and "Gift Certificates With Over $200 Remaining" as well as perform advanced searches. Changing the status of a gift certificate is as easy as selecting a new status using the status select box and viewing the complete history of a gift certificate (such as which orders it has been used for) is as easy as expanding the gift certificate with the + icon.
There's quite a few settings available for configuring the gift certificates feature.
- The gift certificate can be completely disabled if you have no use for it.
- You can allow customers to select from one or more predefined gift certificate values or allow them to enter a custom value themselves. (for which a minimum & maximum value can be specified)
- Gift certificates can be set to expire after a certain number of days/months/years after they've been activated.
- The available gift certificate themes can also be enabled or disabled.
So there you have it, an overview of the gift certificates functionality we've built in to Interspire StoreSuite NX. As you can see, it's quite powerful for the initial release and we'll hopefully build upon after the initial release of StoreSuite to implement any other feature requests or changes you may have.
As I mentioned previously, Interspire StoreSuite is now feature complete for the 1.0 release. From now on we'll be doing a lot of documentation and internal testing. Mitch will be posting an overview and contacting beta testers within a few weeks to organise the private beta testing phase.
From myself and Mitch, as well as the rest of the Interspire team, I want to take this opportunity to wish you all a very Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year and thank you for your loyal support over 2007.
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Comments
Comment #1 (Posted by Johan)
Rating:
Once again im impressed as well as eager to start testing StoreSuite (will pre-purchase licenses in a few days!).
Is the gift certificates that is sent out via email as attachments to all of the recipients sent as MIME, plain HTML or text including attachement?
We would appreciate MIME so that all recipients can see the Gift Certificate, a few in Text and Most as HTML, this would look very professional. Have a nice Christmas and thanks once again for all your efforts :D
Btw: Will StoreSuite support:
1. Multiple Languages & Currencies
2. Recurrency Orders
3. PDF Invoices / Packing Slips
4. Display All prices including shipping if needed
[From Chris: Hi Johan, when a gift certificate is sent out via email, there is an email sent to the recipient stating they've received a gift certificate - attached to the email is the actual gift certificate which contains the code and value. Recipients can simply open the attachment and it will open in their web browser where they can print it.
Whilst StoreSuite supports multiple languages, only a single language can be active at one time. In future releases we'll be looking in to allowing you to translate product information in to multiple languages and have it displayed based on the users locale. The same applies for currencies. At the moment, only one active currency is supported at a time.
Recurring orders is a feature that has been requested a few times but also won't be in the first release.
As for PDF invoices and packing slips, they'll no doubt come in a future version too.
By all prices, if you mean on the product pages too, StoreSuite will display this information if possible (if you're using a fixed shipping rate for example). As soon as we have all the information we need (tax settings, shipping costs) to generate a complete price, we do so and show it if possible.]
Is the gift certificates that is sent out via email as attachments to all of the recipients sent as MIME, plain HTML or text including attachement?
We would appreciate MIME so that all recipients can see the Gift Certificate, a few in Text and Most as HTML, this would look very professional. Have a nice Christmas and thanks once again for all your efforts :D
Btw: Will StoreSuite support:
1. Multiple Languages & Currencies
2. Recurrency Orders
3. PDF Invoices / Packing Slips
4. Display All prices including shipping if needed
[From Chris: Hi Johan, when a gift certificate is sent out via email, there is an email sent to the recipient stating they've received a gift certificate - attached to the email is the actual gift certificate which contains the code and value. Recipients can simply open the attachment and it will open in their web browser where they can print it.
Whilst StoreSuite supports multiple languages, only a single language can be active at one time. In future releases we'll be looking in to allowing you to translate product information in to multiple languages and have it displayed based on the users locale. The same applies for currencies. At the moment, only one active currency is supported at a time.
Recurring orders is a feature that has been requested a few times but also won't be in the first release.
As for PDF invoices and packing slips, they'll no doubt come in a future version too.
By all prices, if you mean on the product pages too, StoreSuite will display this information if possible (if you're using a fixed shipping rate for example). As soon as we have all the information we need (tax settings, shipping costs) to generate a complete price, we do so and show it if possible.]
