Virtual gift cards
I would like to issue gift cards without using a physical plastic card and scanner.
I see gift cards currently have barcodes, but I can't find any way of emailing them to a customer.
Is it possible to send a gift card as an email? Or would it be possible to add this feature?
Comments
4 comments
I have put this in our internal tracker. Would also be nice to see what others think
It's certainly not a necessity to use physical Gift Cards. All they do is contain an identifying number, which you can either scan or read right off the card to enter manually - no Customer Name or $ amount is recorded on the card. It seems like the only advantage at all of using barcoded gift cards is that you don't have to enter the number manually.
In PHP POS, the Gift Card # brings up the $ amount, and you can also look up the purchasing customer in the Gift Card module. The absolute only thing that's needed to use the Card, though, is that number. I would think you could send that number out in any format and by any means you want.
Agreed. The problem is that currently there is no way of sending the number from within PHPPOS. If my staff have to copy and paste the number and the customer's email address it's likely to go wrong sometimes.
Well, that's true. But what we also do is go into the Gift Cert. module right after selling it, and replace the purchaser's name with the recipient's, so at least if there's some screw-up with the number we can still look it up easily.
Ideally, I'd imagine a scenario where there's a field for both purchaser and recipient on the sale screen - something like how the Transfer screen in Receivings now works for multi-location use. I'd guess most people won't have occassion to use Transfer, but I think it's kind of a parallel situation. The Transfer process had been kind of convoluted, but Chris recently changed it so that you just go into Receivings, change from PO to the Transfer function, and fields for both the source location and the destination come up to fill in. The whole thing is done on the same screen, and the items are deducted from the one location, and added to the other. The one feature not there is the "email" button - which I personally don't have any need for for Transfers.
Anyway, I wonder if a similar setup in Sales would be possible. I understand that change in Transfers may have been a huge piece of work, so may not be the best way, but it seems that the net result would be the same. And that Email button that all the other sales have could be added. Just a thought, anyway.
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