Do you use the Gift Certificates feature?

[cekman]

I'm thinking about selling gift certificates. This is something I wasn't able to do on my old site.

How many of you offer this? Has it worked well for you?

Are there any known problems/hassles you've run into with them?

Do you offer to mail the gift certificate in addition to emailing it? If so can you charge for shipping?

Do they get lost often or are they contested often?

Can you look up all orders where a gift certificate number has been used so you can show a customer where the amount was spent?

Thanks for any input!
Carla Ekman
http://cobwebcorner.com

[rrw]

We use them, but in a different way. We offer swatches of our fabrics, and charge a $5.00 fee--we wanted to make it possible for the customer to apply the fee toward a future purchase, so we made the swatch product a gift certificate. They use the number generated to receive a $5.00 discount when they place their order.

My only complaint is that the certificate number is not listed on the customer's invoice or their account--I have to do that manually each day before I print the invoices. If I don't, then I'll have customers several weeks down the road calling to ask what number to use for their discount. That was really a hassle because you can only look them up by date right now. From what I understand, however, the new update will have improved features for the gift certificates and I think this is one of them.

Overall, it has worked very well for us. We have not had anyone dispute them since we started 5 months ago.

[deerefun]

We do. Look here to see how we do it. feel free to ask any questions that you may have.

[ScribeTime]

Wow Steve - great job! Very thorough and clear.

Thanks a lot for posting.

[shellqc]

I'm glad I stumbled across this message. Great ideas. I've been trying to figure out the best way to do catalogs. I hate to charge for a catalog but if I wind up sending out so many random catalogs it can really add up.

I'm thinking I can use this somehow, like you do RRW. Maybe I'll set it to charge $3 and then they can use that toward a future purchase. Maybe I'll drum up some sales and offset some of the costs. hmmm

Any thoughts?

[rrw]

It has really helped our business--we used to get a lot of requests for our free swatch samples but didn't seem to have the corresponding orders. We even read posts on message boards where customers were stating that other companies told them to request our free swatch samples, decide which color was best, then order from them. Needless to say, we weren't too happy about that. Now that we charge for them, it weeds out only the serious customers. Since we are covering our costs, and have fewer to produce, we have also been able to upgrade the quality of our samples.