Rewards point and Gift Certificates - input please

[cekman]

I don't do a lot with gift certificates - but recently I've started giving customers $10 gift certificates if I interview them for my blog.

Anyway - I was just playing around and happened to notice that a customer who used a gift certificate was only awarded points on the portion of the order they had to pay for. The $10 of the order for the gift certificate received no points.

I was pretty sure that if you BUY a gift certificate you don't get points either. So I checked with support to clarify and here is their response

After some testing it does seem that our system will not apply reward points to the purchase or use of gift certificates. So rather than a situation where double points are given, no points are actually being given for the entire transaction. This is probably the best scenario to avoid issues with points, and you can simply put a note in your terms and conditions that no points will be given for their purchase or use. Please let us know if you have any additional questions. Thanks!

I think someone should get the points, but am curious as to what others think. What's your opinion and did you realize this was how the cart worked?

Thanks for your input.

My preference: When a gift certificate is issued or purchased no points are awarded. When the GC if used to place an order the points are awarded then. To me it's just another form of payment.

[ScribeTime]

I think I'd prefer for points to be rewarded when the gift certificate is purchased. That way if I have a customer who wants to purchase multiple gift certificates for family and friends, say for the holidays - then they would be the one rewarded for making that original purchase.

[widgets]

^^^ That sounds better, having the gift cert purchaser get the reward points.

Or maybe a work around is to sell a $25 gift cert for $23.

[cekman]

Don't like the idea of selling $25 GC for $23 - or everyone would do that prior to purchasing ANYTHING.

Wish I knew what most other companies did.