Gift certificates can be a great way to increase sales for your store especially around holiday times. This document explains how to create a gift certificate in Store Editor and Catalog Manager depending on your choice of building tool, and also how to manage gift certificates in Store Manager. Note: This feature is only available with Merchant Solutions Standard and Professional packages.

Jump to:

• Create a gift certificate item in Store Editor
• Create a gift certificate item in Catalog Manager
• Managing your gift certificates

Create a gift certificate item in Store Editor

1. Sign in to your My Services page.
2. Click the Store link.
   
3. Go to Store Editor.
   
4. Navigate to the page where you wish to display the gift certificate in your site.
   Hint: If creating more than one gift certificate, you can create a Gift Certificates section that lists all your gift certificate offers.
5. Click the Item button in the Editor toolbar to create a new item.
      
6. Enter the item name (e.g. $20 Gift Certificate) and price (e.g. $10) (see note on incremental pricing).
   
7. Scroll down to the Gift-certificate variable and select Yes from the pull-down menu. When you publish your store, the Gift Certificate item will automatically set the taxable and need-ship variables to No, because gift certificates are non-taxable and sent by email.
   
8. Click the Update button.
   
9. Publish when ready.
   

You should consider revising your order confirmation email to include a paragraph about gift certificates. You might explain that if a gift certificate was purchased, then it will be emailed within 1 day (or whatever amount of time you have selected).

Create a gift certificate item in Catalog Manager

1. Sign in to your My Services page.
2. Click the Store link.
   
3. Go to Catalog Manager.
   
4. Click the Add button to add a new item.
   
5. Fill out all required fields and enter information you wish to display for non-required fields.
6. Select Yes from the pull-down menu for the Gift Certificate field.
   
7. Click the Save button.
   
8. Publish your catalog when ready.
   

Notes:

• Incremental pricing cannot be used in conjunction with gift certificates, whereby for example one gift certificate item has a $25 price, with incremental pricing options for a $50 or $100 gift certificate. You must set up individual gift certificate items for each price point you wish to offer.
• If you've built your store with a web hosting application, you will then need to use Store Tags to pull the information for your gift certificate item from your product catalog. Learn more about Store Tags.
• Gift certificate codes that are generated will not contain the following characters, which can easily be misread and confused for other characters by customers: 0,O,1,I,l,6,G,S,5,B,8,Z,2.

Managing your gift certificates

The Gift Certificates page accessible from the Store Manager allows you to set up your gift certificate options (return email address, number of certificates to display, when to send gift certificate notification email). You can also view a summary of all Gift Certificates and view statistics for each individual gift certificate. Note: In order to set up gift certificates options, you will need to set up at least one gift certificate item using the instructions listed above.

Set up gift certificate options

1. Sign in to your My Services page.
2. Click the Store link.
   
3. Click Gift Certificates.
   
4. Next to Max rows per page, choose how many gift certificates you want to display on this page.
   
5. Click the Update button.
   
6. Go back to Store Manager the go to Shipment & Order Status.
   
7. Click the Gift Certificate Email Settings tab.
   
8. On the Gift Certificate Email Settings page:
   • Gift Certificate Email - Enable HTML Gift Certificate Email. Learn more.
   • E-mail gift certificates - Select when you want to have gift certificates emailed to the recipients. You can choose to send the gift certificate code manually via email. The default selection is one day after purchase.
   • Gift Certificate Email Address - Enter a Reply-To: address for the gift certificate email. The email will be sent from "noreply@store.turbify.com".
   • Gift Certificate Email Subject - Enter a custom subject on gift certificate emails.
   • Store URL - Confirm your store's full URL.
   
9. Click the Save/Preview HTML Email button.
   

Note: Merchants should be careful in selecting to email gift certificates immediately after the order is placed. If you send the gift certificate email immediately, you are not able to review possible fraudulent orders and fraudsters can then order goods using the gift certificate code emailed to them.

Sending a gift certificate by mail

If your store provides recipients with a paper gift certificate, instead of or in addition to email notice, you can view the Gift Certificates Purchased section (see above) to get the Gift Certificate code. You can then print this code on the paper gift certificate before sending to the recipient. You may wish to provide instructions for using the gift certificate at your store to the person receiving the gift.

Getting an overview

The Gift Certificate Summary section displays a summary of gift certificate totals for your store (see above).

• Total Amount Purchased - Shows the total dollar amount of all gift certificates purchased in your store.
• Total Balance - Shows the total dollar amount of unredeemed gift certificates in your store.

Looking at Individual gift certificates

The Gift Certificates Purchased section displays a listing of all of the gift certificates purchased at your store (see above). You can sort these in various ways:

• Date Issued - Useful for finding the latest gift certificate ordered or the oldest gift certificate in the system.
• Amount - Useful for viewing the largest gift certificates in the system.
• Balance - Useful for finding high or low dollar amount gift certificates.

Sort gift certificates

Click the link for the column you wish to sort and click the arrow next to the link to sort ascending or descending.

Adjust the number of individual gift certificate summaries in the Gift Certificates Purchased section

Edit the number in the Max rows per page field. The page will display 200 summaries per page by default. When sorting you may wish to increase this number to view more summaries per page.

Additional information

Individual gift certificate summaries will also display the gift certificate code and the Order ID. If you are looking for a particular order, you can use the order look-up system to look up orders associated with specific gift certificate codes. Copy the gift certificate code into the order look-up field to view all orders associated with that code (including the order that purchased the gift certificate). The gift certificate code is displayed only on the Gift Certificate page in the Store Manager.

Note: Marking an order as fraudulent, returned, or cancelled will invalidate all gift certificate codes related to that order. If you go back and mark the order as OK, the gift certificate codes will once again be valid. If you cancel an order where a gift certificate was used, the gift certificate will not automatically restore to the balance prior to the order. You must call to have the amount restored.

See Also:

• Gift Certificate Guidelines
• Customize your gift certificate emails with HTML