As a merchant, you can set up gift certificate as products. Customers can select gift certificates as products and pay for the gift certificate at checkout. They can then use the gift certificates themselves or send the gift certificate to someone else to use. We will see how to do all this from the merchant and from the customer point of view in this tutorial.
Follow the below steps to set up gift certificate products. If instead, you just want to send an gift certificate to a particular individual, then follow our "sending out gift certificate" tutorial.
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. See section below titled "Releasing Gift Certificates" to see what approval process is required if this is set to true.
Now we can create the gift certificate product.
4. In Zen Cart admin create a category "Gift Certificates"
5. Inside that category, click "New Product" to create a new product and enter the following to create a $5 gift certificate product...
Remember that you have to set the model of this product to a value that starts with 'GIFT' (in capital letters) in order to indicate to Zen Cart to process this product as a gift certificate.
6. You also need to prepare and upload a product photo to represent your gift certificate product. For example, the default Zen Cart installation uses product photos like ...
7. Then click the "Preview" button and then "Update" button in order to save this product to your store.
Now customer can purchase gift certificates on your store. Typically, the first step of the checkout process is for the customer to specify their shipping address. However, if the only thing the customer purchases are gift certificates (or other virtual products) and if you had made the setting as in this example, then ZenCart will skip the first step and not ask for the shipping address.
Other than that, checkout proceeds as normal.
If "Queue Purchases" had been set to false as we had done, then the customer will immediately have available the funds of the gift certificate. They will see this additional message in their checkout success confirmation page ....
Also when they log into their account and click on the "My Account" link, the customer will see the amount of their gift certificate balance....
The customer can use the gift certificate for himself/herself or send it to someone else to use.
In the first case of using the gift certificate for himself/herself, the customer buys other products as usual and goes through checkout. At checkout, ZenCart will know the balance of the gift certificate that the customer has. Customer types in the amount of the gift certificate to apply to his total as shown...
and the deduction is shown in the final confirmation step of the checkout...
In the second case, if the customer wants to send the gift certificate to someone else to use, the customer logs into his/her account and click the "My Account" link to see his/her gift certificate balance...
He/she would click on the button that says "Send a Gift Certificate"...
And then enter recipient's name, email, message, and amount to send ...
Note that here, we did not have to send the full amount of the gift certificate. Click the "send" button. And then click the "confirm" button as shown below...
A confirmation message indicates gift certificate has been sent...
ZenCart will immediately send an email to the recipient ....
with link to redeem certificate.
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.
Note that the merchant can see these randomly generated redemption codes in "Zen Cart admin -> Gift Certificates / Coupons -> Gift Certificate Sent" ...
And they can see if they had been redeemed or not.
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 as merchant had set "Queue Purchases" to "true" in "Admin -> Modules -> Order Total -> Gift Certificates", then you will have to manually release each gift certificate purchase before the gift certificate funds become available for use.
Whenever an order for a gift certificate comes in, you will see a "Gift queue" button in the "Admin -> Customers -> Orders" ...
You will also see a "Gift Queue" button at the header of the admin area ...
When you click these buttons, they will take you to "Admin -> Gift Certificate -> Gift Certificate Queue" where you will see a list of gift certificates ...
You as admin need to click on the "Release GIFT" button (shown above) and then click "Confirm" shown below in order to make the funds of the gift certificate available to the customers....
Upon the release of the gift certificate, the purchaser will receive an email that looks like ...
Now when the user logs in, he/she will see the gift certificate balance in his/her account as mentioned above.
Because of the extra release process and the fact that the customer does not get the funds right away and starts asking questions, it is recommended to "Queue Purchases" to false in order to auto-release the gift certificate funds.
As you can see, some user scenarios can get quite complex and there are many additional customer-facing pages when gift certificates are in use. Developers may need to customize the wording of some of these pages and email notification text to their liking. Template changes may have unintentional side effects on these customer-facing pages and may even break gift certificate functionality.
Hence it is important to test thoroughly all the various use case of gift certificates. If you want to go through the whole process without using real money, set your payment module temporarily to check/money as described in the testing tutorial. Remember to set things back when done.
