Matching Gift Certificates with Redeemed Orders

[afiumano]

Is there a way to easily match an order that was paid for by a gift certificate to that original gift certificate order? In admin and in the email confirmation, all it says is "Customer Credit" under payment type. There currently isn't a way to match them up. It would be great to see the corresponding order numbers, as well as gift certificate number. Any ideas how to get that data?

[Kent Multer]

The store isn't really set up to track gift certs that way. When a customer redeems a gift cert, the value is added to their Customer Credit Balance, which means it may be mixed with other funds such as a refund from a previous order. Then the money from the gift cert might be spread across several small purchases; and a customer might use a split payment to pay for a single order with a mix of credit-balance and some other payment method such as a credit card. And if a customer happened to redeem two or more certs around the same time, all the money would be combined; if the the customer later spends part of the money, there's no way to tell which cert was used.

With all that going on, it can be impossible to figure out exactly how much of a cert's value was spent on which orders. But in actual practice, I suppose, not many of your customers will have refunds in their credit balance, and few of them will ever redeem two certs at the same time. So if an approximate solution is good enough for your purposes, you could simply watch for credit-balance purchases, and match them with the most recent cert that was redeemed by the customer. It may be possible to do that manually by downloading store data into a spreadsheet; or maybe some of the 3rd-party order-management systems can help with it. If you're interested in a custom solution, of course, you can drop me a line by email to discuss it in detail.

Thanks --

[afiumano]

The manual process won't work in this case as the data needs to be able to be exported out of miva and imported into accounting software. Currently this is done through a custom feed using the Generic Export Module. There are almost 300 gift certificates that have been purchased and there isn't a way to match them up with their redeemed orders. Some of the certificates have been redeemed offline so it has caused a problem. Would a custom solution even be able to fix this?

[Kent Multer]

I can provide a module that will detect when a customer pays for an order (or part of an order) with a credit balance. Then the module will find the most recent gift certificate that the customer had redeemed. In most cases, that will be the one you want. What happens next is up to you: the module can display the info on an admin page, export it to a file, do an instant on-line transfer of the data to some other servers, etc. All the needed data is in the store;s DB, so the module can generate a report on your old orders, as well as new ones that come in after the module is installed. What would you like it to do?

Thanks --

[afiumano]

After talking with the client it seems that what we need is for the gift card code (the 16 digits) to come through on the order confirmation email, as well as be in the order screen in admin.

I did find that in a customer account record, under the "Account Credit" tab, Miva shows the initial gift certificate code that was redeemed and the order # of the order where the customer credit/gift cert was used. So it seems the data is actually in the system, just in a different way.

Is there any way to get the gift certificate code to come through on the order confirmation email of the order where the customer credit was used since it seems the data is available?

[Bruce - PhosphorMedia]

You could use a custom order field for that.

[afiumano]

I was thinking the same - but it seems it would be pretty complicated to have the custom order field show that data?

[Bruce - PhosphorMedia]

Not really, you just need to run the Write_Order function on the page where the gift certificate is redeemed using the form post variable for the cert. this is

[afiumano]

What if the certificate was previously redeemed and they have an account balance already and are then going to place an order and pay with it? I have tried placing the following on the OSEL and OPAY pages but I am not seeing anything in the tokenlist.

<mvt:do file="g.Module_Feature_GFT_DB" name="l.success" value="GiftCertificate_Read(giftcertificate var)" />
<mvt:do file="g.Module_Feature_GFT_DB" name="l.success" value="GiftCertificate_Load_Code(code, giftcertificate var)" />
<mvt:do file="g.Module_Feature_GFT_DB" name="l.success" value="GiftCertificateList_Load_Order(order_id, giftcertificates var)" />

[afiumano]

Does anyone know if any of the above is possible using what Bruce suggested? Kent, I am not sure if what you were suggesting would accomplish this or not?

[Bruce - PhosphorMedia]

The problem is, to paraphrase (and correct) what has already been noted, that Gift Certificates, while originally tied to a "Certificate Code", become a Customer Balance. That customer balance may be the from at least two different sources: Certificates or Refunds. However, it is highly likely, that almost ALL balances will be from Certificate. So, one COULD set a custom CUSTOMER field, to store a Cert Code. Then, using SMT, watch for both a Customer Id (so you can poll whether or not the customer has anything in this field) AND if the order payment contains a balance, and based on that, write something into a custom ORDER field.

The setup and code for this isn't rocket science, but it's not as simple as making toast. It could certainly (and probably easier) be done using a custom module. But at this point, unless the above is abundantly clear, you might consider farming this work out.

[Kent Multer]

It may be possible to do this with template code instead of a module; I can't answer that one off the top of my head. Template code will cost less than a custom module, but it will still take some programming experience to get it working and make it reliable.

[Bruce - PhosphorMedia]

Template code will cost less than a custom module...

Sometimes :)

The overhead of working around some of the limitations of SMT code can sometimes offset the additional overhead of a custom module. Plus, a custom module can sometimes be made to allow for easier template updates (i.e, instead of dozens of lines of SMT code, you might just have one SMT item in the template.

[Kent Multer]

Bruce is right, of course. There are plenty of reasons why a module may be a better choice. And in many cases, even if the job can be done with SMT, it still takes a lot of expertise to get it working correctly. So it makes sense for a store owner to hire a pro to write the code, instead of trying to figure it out for themselves.

[afiumano]

In either case, I do need assistance. I am curious though - I know only the basic difference between a module and SMT code (one you install, SMT code you simply write the code on the template pages) but what is the technical difference? Is there performance differences? I know a module is easier to use for a store owner a lot of the times. I definitely like the idea of making future updates easier.