Best way to issue store credit?

[piaf]

For those of you who have used 3dCart stores for awhile, what is the best way to issue a customer a store credit for a return? Gift certificates or coupons?

[brassandsilver]

We much prefer coupons. For me, personally, I feel that way because I think the idea of having gift certificates be a product is ridiculous. On our old site, we used gift certificates extensively. On our 3d website, we no longer offer them at all unless a customer specifically requests it. Given my strong opinion on that subject, I am probably not the most objective person to ask...

[piaf]

Ok, a related question about coupons... let's say I issue a coupon for $10.00. Can that coupon be used for an item that costs $8.00 with the remaining $2.00 applied towards shipping costs? Basically can the coupon be applied towards the ORDER TOTAL rather than the PRODUCT TOTAL?

[Trevor]

We use gift certificates. You do not have to sell gift certificates in order to issue one to a customer. The nice thing with the gift certificates is that 3dCart will keep track of the balance owing, so the customer can use it fully or partially against an order. It will be applied against the order total.

[brassandsilver]

Well, that would be the drawback of using coupons in this instance. The coupon will only apply to the product total, so a $15.00 coupon used for a $12.00 purchase will only apply $12.00. You could credit that back afterwards, of course, but that is less than ideal if you want the customer to be able to use their credit for shipping. We only have it apply to products, so that hasn't ever been an issue for us.

[piaf]

Trevor, because of the fact that the GC applies to the order total, I think that's what we'll need to use in this particular circumstance. So how do you go about issuing a GC to a specific customer for store credit? Is there somewhere inside the admin to do that?

[shopgirltx]

Settings>Payment>Gift Certificates

[piaf]

Thanks for the help everyone. Got the GC made and sent to the customer. :)

[piaf]

We had a secondary issue with the Gift Certificate, and I guess this is something 3dCart REALLY needs to fix...

The GC was for $22.57. The customer came back into the store and placed an order for a total of $16.54. She was able to apply the GC without any problem, but on the final page of the multi-page checkout, it error'd out saying it needed a valid form of payment. So I logged into her cart to try it myself... and yep, I got the same error. So apparently, if your GC is greater in value than your order, we get this insane error. To get past it, I had to activate a "No Payment Required" payment method just long enough to choose that as the payment method and get the order to go through. Then I had to go back and inactivate that payment method again.

So does this happen EVERY time a customer tries to pay for an order that is less than the value of the GC?? It's just nuts.... we're very disappointed with the GC payment function and we probably lost a customer over all the trouble it created. :mad:

[brassandsilver]

That, I think, gets back to my complaint about having gift certificates set up as products. They aren't! Our old shopping cart had literally NO features, which is why we made the switch to 3d. While we love it here, we lost two very basic functions - gift wrap and gift certificates. These are two very basic features, and it blows me away that they have continued to be overlooked by 3dCart.

[elightbox]

You should always have the "No Payment Required" off-line method activated. Just have the minimum as 0 and max as 0. So this method will only show up when the order total is 0, such as in this case.

[piaf]

You should always have the "No Payment Required" off-line method activated. Just have the minimum as 0 and max as 0. So this method will only show up when the order total is 0, such as in this case.

I never noticed the min/max order total settings on Payment options, so this is a revelation to me! :) Thanks for that, now customers can use their gift certificates the way gift certificates are supposed to be used! Whew!

[shopgirltx]

That is interesting. I hadn't seen that either. I guess we have never come up with someone using less than the gift certificate amount. Thanks for the tip! I would never have known a problem could occur on this or how to fix it.