Michael Roebuck's Blog

With the Holiday season upon us, I have been getting several questions about how Yahoo Gift Certificates work. It's really quite easy, but does require a little thought.

Yahoo! Gift Certificates are designed for use on websites. They don't work very well with brick and mortar stores. The easiest way for a customer to use an online gift certificate in the retail store would be to create a dummy item for $0.01 and after the customer leaves the store, place an order for that amount. That will deduct the amount the customer spent from the remaining gift certificate balance.

Marking an order as fraudulent, returned, or cancelled will invalidate all gift certificate codes related to that order. If you go back and mark the order as "OK", the gift certificate codes will once again be valid.

A big item you need to know is if you cancel an order where a gift certificate was used, the gift certificate will not automatically restore to the balance prior to the order. You must contact Yahoo to have the amount restored.

Lastly, the email that is automatically generated once the customer buys a gift certificate cannot be altered. If you want a custom email you must set the gift certificate option to send manually and create the email yourself. Just don't forget to send it!

Gift certificates are a great way to increase sales, especially during holiday seasons. I hope this helps answer a few questions.

Labels: certificate, gift