You can set up Gift Certificates in Miva Merchant. Think of gift certificates as those gift cards that you might see at the checkout aisles at your local grocery store for stores like Amazon or iTunes. When a gift certificate is purchased by a customer, it will send them a gift certificate code that when they punch into your online store, will be redeemable as credit toward a future purchase in your Miva Merchant store.
In this video we will show you how you can set up a product to be a gift certificate and then we'll show you how you can add a gift certificate to an existing product in your store. For instance, if you wanted to offer a special deal where a customer purchases a red shirt and you wanted to give them a $10 gift certificate good for a future purchase. First let's create a gift certificate product. I already have a category called “Gift Ideas” and in this category I'm going to add a new product, so I go into the Product tab for the Edit Category page of Gift Ideas I click on this “+” sign to add a new product. I’m going to give this product a code, “Gift Certificate” and I'm going to name this product “Gift Certificate.” Let's give it a price of $50 and I'll click the “Add” button to add this product to my store. Now just to be thorough, I'm going to give it an image. I already have an image in my store, so I'm going to search for it and select it. I want to give it a type of “Main,” which will allow this product to appear in pages that are lists like my Category Display Page or my Product List Page. Now so far this has all been steps to adding a traditional product to my store where I tell my Miva Merchant store that this is a gift certificate product under the gift certificate Sales tab which is tucked away in this elipses. I’m going to click on it and select Gift Certificate Sales. I want to check this box that reads, “Generate a Gift Certificate” when this product is purchased. I want the gift certificate to be the same value as the product itself, so I’ll leave this bubbled in. Notice that by default the “Gift Certificate Notification” email will be sent to the Shipping email address that the customer supplies at checkout. Being that this product is a gift certificate I can reason that the purchaser of the certificate intends to gift this product to another person, so I'm going to offer the option for the purchaser of the certificate to punch in the recipient's email address by checking this option off and I also want to offer the customer the option to send a gift message to the recipient as well. So we're going to be configuring this field called Gift Description Attribute as well. Before we can configure these two settings though, we need to add some attributes to this gift certificate product. Let's go into attributes and then click the “Add Attribute” button. For the first attribute I'm going to give it a code of gc (for gift certificate)- recipient. For the prompt I'm going to have it read “Gift Recipients Email Address.” The type of attribute will be a text field. I’m going to hit “Enter” to save my work and I'm going to enter one more attribute. I'm going to give it a code of “GC-Message” and for the prompt I’ll enter “Send Recipient a Gift Message” and I'll click on this drop down and select “Text Area” and again I'm going to hit “Return” to save my work. Now I need to remember that the codes for these attributes are “gc-recipients” and “gc-message.” Let’s go back into the Gift Certificates Sales tab and now we want a checkmark this box and in this field we want to type in “GC - recipient.” This associates the Shopper entered notification email address to the recipient's email address attribute that we created and down here we want to type in “GC-Message” which associates the gift description attribute to the message attribute that we created. Once we're done here we're going to click “Update” to save our work.
There's one last thing that I want to do just to be thorough, this product happens to be a completely digital product. I have no need to ship this product to my customers and because of that I don’t want to charge shipping if someone buys this product from my store. So I want to flag this product as a “Free Shipping” product, so I need to add this product to my “Shipping Not Applicable” Price Group. Now if this Price Group idea is completely new to you, I highly recommend that you watch our video on “Free Shipping on Select Products” which will explain in detail how to set this up. I’m just going to add the gift certificate product to this price group and now we can go back to the gift certificate product in our store. If I click on this “More” button, I can click on “View on Live Store.” This is what our gift certificate product looks like to your customers.
Let's go ahead and add this gift certificate to my basket. I’ll enter my email address here so that I can receive the gift certificate, but let's pretend that I'm typing in John’s email address instead and for the gift message I'll type in, “Happy birthday John. Here is $50 from Merchant Tutorials.” I’ll click add to cart and let's proceed through checkout. Here you can see that all of my shipping options are zeroed out because I added this product to my Free Shipping on Select Products Price Group. I'll just select my MasterCard and complete my order.
Now that I have this order completed let me check my email. Here is the confirmation email that I got as the customer. Here you can see that it includes the gift certificate code that was generated and it also shows me the email address I'm sending the gift certificate to and finally the message, “Happy birthday John. Here is $50 from Merchant Tutorials.” Finally, I received a second email. This email goes to the email address recipient that I entered when I added the gift certificate product to my shopping basket. This is what that email looks like. Here is the message that I entered and here is the code for redeeming this gift certificate. The instructions read, “To redeem your gift certificate click here and enter the following code.” I'm going to copy this code and then click on this link. The link takes me to a page where I can sign in to an existing account at the store, or I can create an account at this time. The reason is to redeem customer credit at a Miva Merchant store requires that you associate the credit balance to a customer account. So let's go ahead and log in as John and I'm going to paste the gift certificate code in this field and click redeem. I am notified that the gift certificate has been applied to my account and I currently have a balance of $50. Now when John goes to purchase something from this Miva Merchant store you can apply his credit balance toward that purchase. Last thing I want to show you is that you don't necessarily need to create a gift certificate product to offer gift certificates to your customers. Let’s go back into the store admin and we're going to pull up a pre-existing product in this store. The $5 shirt here, when someone purchases this product, they're buying a $5 shirt, but you can have some sort of promotion where anyone who purchases a $5 shirt will get a $10 gift certificate. To do that we need to go back into the Gift Certificate Sales tab and we want to check off “Generate Gift Certificate” when this product is purchased and right now we have the gift certificate amount set to the product sale price. If we left it here, the gift certificate that's generated will be $5 because this product is priced at $5. So we're going to have to override that by clicking on “Fixed Amount.” We’ll change that to $10, click “Update” to save our work and let’s purchase this product to see all of it in action. Just add the product to the basket and click, “Checkout.” I'm still currently logged in as John, that's fine. I'll just scroll down click “Continue.” I need to select a shipping method and a payment method. Here we can see that the $50 gift certificate is available to me as a payment method. I'm going to select that and click “Continue.” If I choose to make a payment with my credit, I have the option of making a split payment. I can pay with my credit balance, or I can pay some of it with my credit balance and some of it with another credit card. Since the total purchase can fit within my credit balance, I'll just leave this alone and click on “Complete Order.” Now let's go to my Order Confirmation email and we can see that we purchased a $5 shirt and it came with a gift certificate code for $10. Let's go ahead and copy this and redeem it by going to my account, clicking on “Redeem Gift Certificate” and pasting it in this field. You can see that my current balance is $34 which reflects the purchase that we just made. When I redeem this new gift certificate, my current balance is now readjusted to reflect $44. And that's gift certificates in Miva Merchant.