Gift vouchers/coupons - can someone please help?..

[russell king]

Hi

Im wanting to sell gift vouchers via my actinic store which are also fully redeemable via the store.

Correct me if im wrong in the following;
I can set up a 'coupon' that triggers a discount for the gift voucher value when someone is using it to buy a product
BUT
The coupon code can not be automatically disabled once it has been used.

Therefore I would have to manually disable all coupon codes once they had been used once. I would also just have to hope that customers don't try and make more than one purchase with the code.

Also I can see from other threads that trying to get gift vouchers not to trigger shipping charges can also be problematic. As can having £0.00 value sale value when integrating with a PSP. Mmmm, all in all Im not looking forward to getting this (surely basic in any ecommerce system) functionality to work...:-(

At the moment the only real solution i can see is for us to handle voucher redemption manually outside of Actinic. i.e, instruct gift voucher holders to find what they want on your website and then telephone or email their order in. Not ideal.

Has anyone come up with a workable solution to a proper gift voucher selling and redeeming scheme in Actinic? If so could you please let me have the exact details of how you get this to work. Any help would be greatly appreciated.

Kind regards

Russell King

[oldhasbeen]

Hi Russell

We managed to get a workable solution for us, but I can't see how it could work with a PSP unless you used pre-authorisation and it's not entirely "automatic", but at least the customer can order on-line.

When they get to check out, they chose the payment method of redeem gift certificate - we then call them to get the unique authorisation code from the certificate. As we process off line, we can then deduct the value of the certificate from the order total and then process the payment for anything over.

I guess it's swings and roundabouts - with a fully automatic system I would also be concerned about things going wrong or somebody trying it on with the certificate more than once (especially if using live payment processing).

From what we found out between bouts of banging heads on walls , there is no real solution in actinic for an automatic way of doing this because of how actinic is set up. Trying to use coupons for gift certificates would cause merry hell so we didn't even try to go there!

However for us, the way we've set it up seems to give the least amount of hassle (i.e only a phone call) backed up by a simple excel sheet to keep a record of certificates issued/redeemed etc. I guess if you were the on-line version of Woolies at Christmas, this would be a nightmare but as a simple work around for us, we'd rather be able to offer the option of gift certificates than not.

Sorry I can't offer you a direct solution to your question though!

[karthik]

Hi Russell,

I am checking this with my development team to find whether there is any work around for it.

[karthik]

Hi Russell,

Please check the link http://community.actinic.com/showthread.php?t=14467 and post #3. In that it says "Coupon codes and Gift vouchers are different, a coupon code is a way of activating a discount, Gift Vouchers is another way to pay for a product." Also the same thread will give you a link to one of our partner who has written a plugin for vouchers.

[RuralWeb]

I called support about this the other day and they assured me that you could use a coupon with a fixed discount (% or value), set an expiry date and set it to be only used once. is this true

[Duncan Rounding]

I don't know how you would set it to only be used once. It also gets complicated when when you want to redeem a coupon of fixed value against goods that are of less value - shipping can go funny due to being negative.

[RuralWeb]

Well thats exactly what I thought, which is why I called them to get it from the horses mouth - I may have been talking to the other end of the horse!

[Nadeem]

Hi Malcolm,

You can restrict a coupon code to be used in only one per order, If the client completes the order and then goes and add another product, he can use the coupon code again. I'm not sure if this is what the Support member meant. Also you can restrict the coupon, via date, customer group and payment method.

Like Karthik mentioned Gift Voucher and Coupon code are completely different, one is a form of payment while the other is just for activating a discount on an order, which means it can be used many times.

Kind Regards

[RuralWeb]

No, I am 100% sure that that is what was said, I even used the phrase "Use as a gift voucher" and was told they could be set to expire after a single use. The reason I checked was that I was preparing a quote for a client who specifically wanted to use gift vouchers

I assume you will have fixed the problem in V8

Why is this such a grey area!

[Nadeem]

Hi Malcolm

No, I am 100% sure that that is what was said, I even used the phrase "Use as a gift voucher" and was told they could be set to expire after a single use. The reason I checked was that I was preparing a quote for a client who specifically wanted to use gift vouchers

I'm sorry to read this. I will pass this to the Support Manager for you.

I assume you will have fixed the problem in V8

I'm afraid Gift Vouchers would not be in v8

Why is this such a grey area!

The idea behind Gift Vouchers is that you can only use them once, therefore when a customer uses a gift voucher, you would need an online database to check to see if it has been used. If it hasn't, then use it, and then store it the database, so it can no longer be used. Currently with the current version of Actinic Catalog, Business or Developer, it is an offline product which does not use an online database.

I hope this answers your question.

Kind Regards

[RuralWeb]

Can you put this info into the tech manual as there is nothing at the moment and it would avoid all this discussion. I was thinking it would not be possible because it would need a database which is why I called the horse.

[wjcampbe]

Malcolm,

Design | Option | Offline - phone tab. Check the box labelled "Horse indicator" so you can see which end you are talking to.

[RuralWeb]

I could then use Advanced | Aditional Files to upload the poo

[russell king]

Hi Karthik
Unfortunately the 3rd party plug is nor what im after. Its a loyalty scheme plugin. What i need is much more simple
And more importantly (and i think like many other Actinic purchasers) I was led to believe was included in Actinic....

I suggest that your marketing people look carefully at their promotional wording used in v7 product descriptions as the whole discount coupon/voucher stuff is confusing and misleading.

Anyway, Actinic doesn't do proper, unique, one time use only gift vouchers, but for the price I paid for the software it should do !!!

Russell King

[RuralWeb]

Sophisticated product-level and customer-level discounting including ‘buy one get one free’, ‘% off orders over…’, time-expiring discounts, coupons etc

This is the confusing bit

time-expiring discounts, coupons etc

.

I agree it needs sorting.