As admin of Zen Cart, you have the ability to send your customers or anyone else a gift certificate to be used on your Zen Cart store.
In order for Zen Cart to be able to process gift certificates, you have to make sure the gift certificate payment module is enabled.
1. In Zen Cart admin, Go to "Modules -> Order Total" and click on "Gift Certificates"
2. If the Gift Certificate is not showing a green status dot, click "Install" to make it green.
3. Click "Edit" and apply the following typical settings.
It is recommended to set "Queue Purchases" to false. This will release the gift certificate to the customer immediately upon purchase.
1. Then, in admin control panel, select "Gift Certificate/Coupons -> Mail Gift Certificate"
2. In the customer droplist, you can select to send the gift certificate to all customers, newsletter subcribers, customers who have never made an order, or an individual customers, and so on ...
3. Or you can even send it to any individual who has an email (does not need to be a customer) ...
In this case, don't select anything in the customer droplist.
4. Fill in the form and click send mail.
5. You will be displayed a preview of the mail that is about to be send. Click "send mail" to this preview screen in order to send the gift certificates.
6. In "Gift Certificate/Coupon -> Gift Certificates Sent", you will see the gift certificates that you had just sent, who it went to, the redeption code, and whether it had been redeemed or not.
7. The receipient of the gift certificate will receive an email with link to redeem...
The recipient of the gift certificate is supposed to click on the link (instead of using the redemption code) to redeem the certificate. The redemption code does not work as well, because then the account email must match the email address of which the gift certificate is sent. And the redemption code entry is at checkout whereby they must purchase something in order to redeem the gift certificate (but it is not applied at this purchase). It is apply in subsequent purchases.
When the recipient of the gift certificate clicks on the redemption link, they are taken to the Zen Cart sign in page where if they already have an account, they can log in. If they don't have an account, they have to create one in order to redeem the gift certificate.
After the creation of the account, they will be directed to the Redeem Gift Certificate page informing them of their gift certificate balance...
Now they can use the gift certificate or pass it on as explained earlier.
If someone tries to redeem the gift certificate twice, it will give an error instead...
If you want to create gift certificate products, see our tutorial here.
