Managing Gift Certificates

If you have Gift Certificates module enabled, you can sell Gift Certificates to your customers.

Note. Gift Certificates module can be enabled through the Administration menu -> Modules.

A Gift Certificate can be used as a payment method, so if a customer purchases a GC at your store for another person, this other person will be able to pay for an order at your store using this GC. Any order containing products can be paid for by a GC (fully - if the GC amount equals or exceeds the sum of the order, or partially - if the amount of the GC is smaller than the sum of the order it is used to pay for). Orders containing just Gift Certificates (no products) cannot be paid for by a Gift Certificate.

The Gift Certificates section of administrator interface allows you to manage Gift Certificates ordered by your customers. You can access it by clicking on Gift certificates in the Management menu.

The 'Gift Certificates' form in this section lists Gift Certificates ordered by your customers.

Note. Expired Gift Certificates are not shown in the list by default. If you want all existing Gift Certificates to be shown, enable 'Show expired gift certificates' option under General Settings -> Modules Options.

Picture 1: Gift certificates.

When your customer orders a Gift Certificate a new Gift Certificate is created with a unique ID (A person who wishes to pay for his order by a GC needs to enter this ID into the Gift Certificate information section of the 'Payment details' form). Unique IDs of the ordered Gift Certificates are shown in the GIFTCERT ID column. Clicking on the ID of a Gift Certificate displays the GC details.

The ORDER column shows the number of the order in which the Gift Certificate was ordered.

The value displayed in the TYPE column signifies wether the Gift Certificate will be sent to the recipient by e-mail or by mail. If you want to send Gift Certificates by snail mail, enable your customers to choose this option by checking General settings -> Modules options -> Enable posting Gift Certificates by mail.

The current status of a Gift Certificate can be found out by looking at the STATUS column. If needed, you can update the status of a Certificate by selecting a new value from the drop-down box and clicking on Update. As soon as a GC is ordered, it automatically gets the status 'Pending'. After the status of the order by which the GC was ordered becomes 'Processed', the status of the GC is automatically updated to 'Active' (Please note that Gift Certificates cannot be used to pay for products until they are activated! If the order is not supposed to be 'Processed', but you need to enable the GC owner to use the GC, you can activate the Certificate manually by selecting 'Active' from the drop-down box). Besides these two values there can be other statuses: 'Blocked', 'Disabled', 'Expired' and 'Used'. A Certificate gets the status 'Blocked' after it was used to pay for an order for the period of time specified in General settings -> Modules options -> Gift Certificate blocking period. This prevents multiple usage of the same Gift Certificate. 'Disabled' can be used to temporarily disable a Gift Certificate. Gift Certificates with the statuses 'Expired' or 'Used' cannot be used to make orders.

The column REM./AMOUNT shows two values for each of your Gift Certificates. The first one shows how much money remains on the certificate and can still be used to pay for orders. The second one shows the total amount of the GC at the time when it was purchased. The store administrator can set the minimum and maximum allowed amounts of money for which Gift Certificates can be purchased at his store (General settings -> Modules options -> Minimum (Maximum) GC value)

The column ADDED shows the date and time when a GC was added and the name of the person who added it. You can view the profile details of the person who added a GC by clicking on the name link.

If necessary, you can create Gift Certificates directly from the admin zone of your store:

Click on the Add new button in the Gift Certificates form. The 'Gift Certificate details' form will be opened.

Picture 2: Gift Certificate details.

Complete the 'Gift Certificates details' form. The fields marked by the red asterisk (*) sign are mandatory for completion.
Click on the Create Gift Certificate link at the bottom of the form. The newly created Gift Certificate will be added to the list of Gift Certificates with the status 'Pending'. Set the status of the Gift Certificate to 'Active' so it can be used to pay for products.

You can use General settings -> Email notifications options to define what notifications should be sent in connection with Gift certificates being purchased.

The look of Gift certificate notifications sent to the orders department and to the Gift certificate purchaser is defined by these templates:

mail/giftcert_notification.tpl

mail/mail_header.tpl

mail/giftcert.tpl

mail/signature.tpl

mail/giftcert_notification_subj.tpl

For HTML mail:

mail/html/giftcert_notification.tpl

mail/html/mail_header.tpl

mail/html/giftcert.tpl

mail/html/signature.tpl

The look of the Gift certificate notification sent to the Gift certificate recipient is defined by these templates: