Selling Gift Coupons

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How to sell gift coupons online

You can use E-junkie to sell two different kinds of gift vouchers online, explained in more detail below:

• Offline gift certificates for your real-world store;
• Online gift coupons for your E-junkie purchase buttons.

Once you set up your gift certificate/coupon product(s) in your E-junkie Dashboard, we provide ready-made purchase button HTML codes you can simply copy and paste into your site, or a Text Link for purchase that you can copy and paste into an email newsletter, or share on social media like Facebook, or anywhere else you can paste or share a link.

If buyers would redeem the gift certificate offline at your real-world store:

If you are not creating Gift Certificates to use with your E-junkie purchase buttons, then it's fairly simple. You just create a product whose price is the amount of the certificate, and post that product's button code to your site. You would still need some way to provide "proof of purchase" that can't be forged or duplicated; we would recommend using the unique Transaction ID for each sale, which you can obtain from your Transaction Log. You could also use our Send Codes features to issue your own "serial numbers" for the certificates you sell.

• If you will use the order's Transaction ID as a serial number for their gift certificate, you can insert that in the buyer's thank-you email and/or thank-you page using the [%txn_id%] template tag;
• If you Send Stored Codes, you would pre-generate a list of codes—e.g., you could use a random string-generator site like Random.org/strings/ for this—and just paste that list into the gift cert. product's settings when you enable the Stored Codes option. We issue one code from the list per unit ordered until the list is depleted, and we notify you when the list is down to your last 5 codes, so you can replenish the list. The standard Product Thank-you Email will automatically include the code, but you can customize this using the tempate tag [%codes%] wherever you want the buyer's code inserted in your custom message;
• If you Send Generated Codes, you can have us contact a script at your end that generates a new code on-the-fly for each purchase and saves you the trouble of pre-generating keys and periodically replenishing that list, but it takes a bit more up-front work to setup.

Whichever method you choose, you could maintain a master list of purchased codes at your shop. When someone comes in to redeem their gift cert., you would match the code they provide with your master list and, say, cross off that code so any duplicate would not be redeemable. This can be as simple as viewing your Transaction Log for the gift certificate product and printing out a copy of those sales records.

If you want to get a bit fancier, you could configure the gift cert. product to offer a Single File Download of a generic certificate image, so buyers could print that out and write the code from their email on the printed certificate.

If buyers would redeem the gift coupon in your online shopping cart:

To create and sell Gift Coupons, you would first add a list of single-use Cart Discount codes, and then sell those codes as a product using our Send Stored Codes feature:

Set up your Gift Coupon discount codes

1. From your E-junkie Dashboard go to Manage Shipping & Tax > Discounts & Gift Coupons;
2. Enter a Discount Name that you'll recognize (e.g., GiftCoupon25 for a $25 Gift Coupon);
3. Select Discount Applies To: Cart Item Total (product-specific discounts cannot work for Gift Coupons because they can only alter the per-unit price of the item, not take a single flat amount off the order total);
4. Enter a Discount Amount for the value of the coupon as a Flat Amount;
5. In the Discount Code box, paste a list of pre-generated codes (one code per line);
   • Tip: To generate a list of random codes automatically, you could use a random string-generator site like Random.org/strings/;
   • Our discount codes are not case-sensitive (a1b2c3 is treated the same as A1B2C3), so you should generate codes using numbers and/or either all-upper or all-lower case letters (not mixed-case letters); we do not support codes with spaces, dashes, underscores, or any other special characters;
   • You can have up to 10,000 discounts in total configured at any one time (i.e., if you have no other discounts, you could paste a list of up to 10,000 codes for Gift Coupons);
   • Be sure to save a separate record of this codes list in a separate text file if you need it, as the codes you paste in here will not be retained in a list format once you create the discount (see final step below).
6. Set the Max. Use Count = 1 (so each code can only be used once);
7. Optional: enter a Min. Item Total equal to the amount of your Gift Coupon*;
8. Click Submit to save your new Discount -- this will generate a series of identical discounts, one for each code you pasted into the Discount Codes box.

Set up your Gift Coupon product to sell online

1. Go to Manage Products > Add Product;
2. Name it something recognizable like Gift Coupon $25;
3. Set its Price the same as the discount amount you'd configured (e.g. if your discount takes $25.00 off, set this Price to $25.00);
4. In the Digital Delivery section:
   • Untick the box for Single File Download;
   • Under Send Codes, tick the box for Stored Codes;
   • This will reveal a box where you can paste in the same list of codes that you'd provided for the Discount previously;
5. Click Submit to save the new product proceed to the button codes screen;
6. Copy the button codes provided and paste them into your site wherever you wish to sell Gift Coupons;
7. Each buyer of this product will be issued one code from the list you'd pasted;
8. The buyer can then forward the code they receive to their chosen gift recipient, or write the code in a greeting card, etc.;
9. The gift recipient would then visit your site, Add to Cart their chosen product(s), then enter their code in the Discount Code section of your shopping cart screen to redeem their Gift Coupon discount.

*NOTE: Gift Coupons cannot retain any unspent value for future use -- e.g., if someone redeems a $25 Gift Coupon on a $20 order total, the remaining $5 would be forfeit (this is why we do not call them "Gift Certificates" :^).

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