AbleCommerce Shopping Cart Software

Is there some place in the wiki or some other place that explains how the gift certificate works in ac 7? I've searched the forum and browsed in the ac7 user guide, reading a lot of notes and discussions, but can't quite see how it all comes together. Some specific questions I have.
1. Customer "buys" a gift certificate (based on product defined as gift certificate) ... does the system "create" the gift certificate when checkout is completed, automatically generating the random serial number?
2. Does it email the gift certificate information to the buyer? (from the discussions I'm not sure exactly what happens here), notification or otherwise. Maybe that has to be built for each individual store?
3. How much "manual accounting" effort is required for the store?
4. Is Gift Certificate an option on the payment page or does that have to be added for each store?
5. Gift Options as referred to in the product apparently refers only to Gift Wrapping and has nothing to do with Gift Certificates - is that correct?

Thanks for any tips, ideas you may be able to provide.

It looks like the GC payment option is included by default (maybe only if merchant has activated at least one GC)
Here's how the process goes:
Customer purchase gift certificate.
Merchant looks at the order and clicks on the gift certificate icon or goes to Manage--Gift certificates to find it.
Merchant then clicks to activate the gift certificate. Customer gets an email saying it has been activated and there is a link in the email to a screen where they can view and/or print the gift certificate.
It doesn't look like the gift certificate number is sent in the email currently. If more than one GC is ordered, customer gets one email for each.

I was just doing some checking on it for a question the boss asked, and I was able to add the GC number to the GC validated email, which would mean the customer wouldn't have to go online to find it and that the email could be formatted to show an attractive GC.
<p>Gift Certificate Number: $giftcertificate.SerialNumber</p>

Then customer could either print it out or forward the email to recipient.

Thanks Judy - I thought one of the notes said the gift certificate could be used online to pay for an order but I can't see where this is "visible" ... have you had any experience with that?

Judy is right. The gift certificate payment option becomes available if you have at lease one gift certificate in the store. In order to test it follow the following steps.

1)- Create a product with Gift certificate option
2)- Add this gift certificate to basket and checkout.
3)- Now again try checkout with some product in basket. This time you will see the gift certificate option available in payment methods list.

mazhar wrote: 2)- Add this gift certificate to basket and checkout.

Thanks for your response mazhar ... since this site isn't yet live I can't really "checkout".
I also tried the demo stable site ... maybe there's a way to check out there ... I'll do some more searching.

bobr2k wrote: I also tried the demo stable site ... maybe there's a way to check out there ... I'll do some more searching.

Cool! I didn't have to actually checkout (just entered name, address, etc.) to see it on the stable demo site. Thanks again!

I have a question about Anonymously ordering gift certificates.

The owner of one the stores I maintain likes to give the customer an option of printing gift certifcates from the store. We have prettied up the gift certificate page that is linked from the order summary page. (This is the page that the customer logs in to views their orders.)

We ran into a snag today when a customer ordered a gift certificate anonymously. As the process permits, the store admin had to apply a serial number before the customer could print it and give the physical piece of paper to a friend as a gift.

The problem arose when the customer was notified that the serial number was ready. But since the order was anonymously created, they didn't have a way of logging in and printing it from the web.

To resolve the issue we had to perform the following manually in the database:

1. Find the user record and the ID for the email address of the customer.
2. Find the order record that was placed anonymously
3. Replace the UserID in the database from the anonymous user record to the actual customer record.

I know this was a mouthful, but identifying and resolving the problem was not very straight forward.

That is, of course if there is an easier way to handle this scenerio. Please let me know if there is. We want to continue to give people an option of ordering anonymously, but need to somehow make it easy to provide access to the printable gift certificate (something more perminant than the email notification)

Thanks,

Marc

I added the gift certificate serial number to the activation email and am going to add a nice image or piece of html code. That might work for you.

jmestep wrote:I added the gift certificate serial number to the activation email and am going to add a nice image or piece of html code. That might work for you.

Would you be willing to share that when it's finished?

Here's how I added the gift ctf # to the email that is sent when the GC is validated.
<p>Gift Certificate Number: $giftcertificate.SerialNumber</p>

You could embed an image or link to an image into the html code on the email template. For an example, here is how I embedded a product image into the Send to Friend email. You could use it as a pattern, but you won't need the conditional logic:
<p>
#if ($product.ThumbnailUrl.Substring(0,2) == "~/")
<a href="${store.StoreUrl}Product.aspx?ProductId=${product.ProductId}">
<img src='$store.StoreUrl/$product.ImageUrl.Substring(2)' border="0" /></a>
#else
<img src='${store.StoreUrl}${product.ImageUrl}' border="0" />
#end </p>

This has been very helpful in getting the certificate number into an email.

Does anyone know how to put the gift certificate amount in the e-mail?

So the email reads:

"Your gift certificate for $100 has been activated. Please use code: 7298347329874932."

Thanks,
Brian

use to get the amount.