Gift Certificates (created in back end and manually emailed to recipients)

Hiya,

We want to create gift certificates in the back end, email manually to the recipient and then they can add to their account to redeem. These are generated as thank yous. We will not be selling gift certificates via the shopping cart, so there are no products created for this.

I have managed to create a coupon with the gift certificate value. If our test user purchases and enters the coupon code (for the gift cert), the sales value is deducted from the coupon. Good :)

However, I've added the menu items for adding a gift cert to their account and to view the balance, and every time we tried to add in either the partially redeemed certificate or a brand new one we have generated, it says "Error Restricted Gift Certificate". If we try to view the remaining balance of their certs, it says no records found.

In the back end, under history of uses, it shows the coupon code and which user used it. Surely this is what links it for them to view in the front end?

Obviously I am missing something in the setup, but I'm finding the help files for gift certificates lacking useful info.

How do we create it so we are manually creating certificates and emailing the code (we will do this bulk), they then redeem themselves and can track the balance on the website, or add in new gift certificates they have received to their account, without having to contact us?

Thanks!

Hello,

Gift certificates can only be added as a balance if there are no redstrictions. You are receiving that error because the gift certificate has some type of restriction, for example, limited to or excluded from categories/products/shipping, etc. The balance is basically money unused, so if you set restrictions to a gift certificate then it cannot be added to the balance.

Hiya Seyi,

Ok, I managed to work out removing restrictions, thanks :) It now adds to the balance and displays.

Next problem is, once a coupon (with gift certificate function) is redeemed once, the remaining balance cannot be used again.

So I create a coupon with the gift certificate function for $100 in the back end. Purchase a product for $30 in the front end and apply the coupon code, order processes fine. It shows a balance to me of $70 (both front and back end). If I try to use the coupon again to purchase another product, it tells me the coupon cannot be found. "SWBRrZg4tq: Coupon code not found. Please try again."

In the back end, it has a orange tick beside it when I view coupons. There is $70 remaining to be used. There are no expiry dates or restrictions of any kind.

I need the user to be able to continue to use the same coupon code until all the value is used up, but over multiple transactions. How do I enable this?

Hello,

In awocoupon->configuration, you probably have "Automatically add valid Gift Certificate to Balance on coupon usage" set to "yes". If so, then this is the correct behavior. Once the order is processed, the $70 remaining cannot be used as a coupon code any more and is now sitting in the balance of the customer account who originally used the gift certificate. This is why it turns orange, to show it is now a customer credit and not a normal gift certificate coupon any more.