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3 Hidden Features of Gift Certificates
3 Hidden Features of Miva’s New Gift Certificate Functionality
With the release of 9.0003 you now have the ability to offer gift certificates to your customers. This allows customers to purchase certificates and redeem them for store credit on your Miva store. Gift Certificates are great tool to help increase average order value, and give your customers options when buying gifts for friends and family.
Beyond the basic ability to offer Gift Certificates on your Miva store, here are 3 lesser known features you automatically get with this new functionality.
1. Gift Certificate Promotion - Give a free gift certificate with the purchase of any product
Any product can be setup to trigger the creating of a gift certificate code. You can also set a fixed price for the certificate. This allows you to do a promotion where if a customer buys a certain product they will also get a gift certificate in any amount of your choosing for a future order. This is a great way to help entice repeat orders from your customers who are already buying from you.
How to Setup
Let’s say for this example we want to offer a free $10.00 Gift Certificate with the purchase of a Ladder Sleeve Top. To set this up, we need to edit our Ladder Sleeve Product and go the “Gift Certificate Sales” tab. Here we can set it to generate a gift certificate key when this product is purchased and set the value of that certificate to be $10.00.
On the Order Confirmation page, the gift certificate will automatically be created and displayed on the screen. An email will also be sent with the Gift Certificate Code.
And if we lookup that code in the admin, we can see it has a value of $10.00
2. Generate Gift Certificates In Bulk
Another useful built in feature of Miva’s built in gift certificates functionality is the ability to generate gift certificates in bulk and then export them into a csv file. This feature can be used for email campaigns or other marketing efforts such as Deal Sites (Groupon, LivingSocial, etc) and special offline promotions. Imagine creating a bunch of small dollar value gift certificates to include in customer orders to drive repeat business.
How to Setup
Under Marketing then Gift Certificates tab click the “ + Generate Button”
Set the amount of each gift certificate key and the number of keys you want to generate:
Export Keys to CSV
Click Generate to create the keys. Once the keys are created you can click the first gift certificate in the list, hold SHIFT on the keyboard and click the last gift certificate. This will select all the keys you want to export and click the CSV icon to export to a CSV file.
3. Send Gift Certificate Code Directly to Recipient
Another nice feature of Miva’s Gift Certificates is the ability to allow the customer to purchase a gift certificate and send the key directly to the recipient via email. There is a customizable email template which the recipient will get containing the gift certificate key and even includes a gift message.
How To Setup
To configure this, you need to add two attributes to your gift certificate product. One for Recipient email address and another for recipient gift message. Make note of the attribute codes you use, because you will need to add these under the Gift Certificate Sales tab for the product.
Setup recipient email attribute:
Setup Gift Message Attribute:
Now when the gift certificate is purchased, the recipient will get a email with the gift message and the gift certificate key:
Digital Delivery & Sales Tax
Because your gift certificate won’t physically be shipped, don’t forget to setup a Digital Delivery shipping method and remove Sales Tax. The new shipping method can be setup as a flat rate shipping method and you can use the Product Shipping Rules to limit which shipping methods display.