Tutorial 2.8: Offering Gift Vouchers

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This tutorial will guide you through setting up the gift vouchers for your site

Detailed Tutorial

You can have your customers buy a Gift Voucher in your online shop that they can give to someone else to spend back in your online shop. Gift Vouchers are a fantastic way to increase your online sales.

Creating Gift Voucher Products

To setup this feature for your online, follow the simple procedure below:

Go to eCommerce->Products
Create a new Product
Click on "Show More Options" and select the "Gift Voucher" checkbox and save

That's all it takes to see gift vouchers in your online shop. You can setup any number of gift vouchers with any value for each one. When a customer buys a gift voucher they will be asked to enter the details of the person who will receive the gift voucher. An email will then be forwarded to that person with the details of the gift voucher that they can spend back in your online shop. Please note that you can also create and import Gift Vouchers using the Product Import feature.

Creating Gift Vouchers Manually

You can create a gift voucher manually which you can send to customers and which they can use in your online shop. Here is the procedure:

Go to eCommerce -> Gift Vouchers
Create a new Gift Voucher

You then need to fill in the information for your voucher and input the message that will be sent to the customer when you email them the voucher. Once you are done, click Save. You can use "Email Me" button to see what the voucher will look like before emailing it to your customer.

Adding Gift Voucher as payment option

You also need to update your checkout process so gift vouchers can be redeemed. To do this you'll need to re-insert your check out form again. Go to Admin -> More Customization Options -> Online Shop Templates. Go to "Registration (Buy)" and using the Module Manager icon on the WYSIWYG editor re-insert the checkout web form. Alternatively you can "Reset to Original" to use the standard checkout web form. When you re-insert the form the system will add a new payment option which is Gift Voucher. You'll also need to add the Gift Voucher field to the "Shopping Cart" step so Gift Voucher codes can be entered and redeemed. Simply add {tag_giftvoucher} to the this step of the checkout.

IMPORTANT: Are you using "Process Offline" or "COD/Check" payment options in your online shop? A gift voucher can only be redeemed if it was purchased successfully. If you use one of the aforementioned options then when a gift voucher is purchased the payment for that gift voucher will be marked as pending. You will need to manually add a successful payment to that purchase in order for the gift voucher to be valid and redeemable. This is a security check to ensure products are not purchased with a gift voucher that has not had its payment validated.

Customization

You can customize the gift voucher form that captures the recipient's details by going to Admin -> More Customization Options -> Online Shop Layouts -> Gift Voucher Form. You can also customize the email that is sent to the recipient with the details of the gift voucher by going to Admin -> Customize System Emails -> Gift Voucher.

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