It is very easy to manage Gift voucher sales & Gift voucher redemption using sync process. There is no worry if you are retailing gift cards for your online store & you are to use them as a payment method during redemption in your ERP system for managing it. There is, however, a solution to not only manage it but also to automate it.
Primarily, in case of gift card use, there are two phases –
- Gift voucher sales
- Gift voucher redemption
In Case of Gift Voucher Sales, basically, a customer is ordering some non-physical items, which will not contain any stock quantity value. After the purchase of that, by any customer, the order can easily be synced in the ERP from the e-commerce or marketplace, whatever you will use. Only the gift voucher item will exist in your ERP as a non-inventory but saleable item. You may define a ‘transaction type’ for gift voucher sales and post the sale to a ‘gift voucher liability’ G/L Account. When a customer purchases a gift card, they can enter an individual gift message for the recipient.
Only relevant for send type E-Mail: During sales order creation, the system identifies the customer and automatically pre-fills the information for the ship-to party, including the e-mail address that is used to send the gift card. The recipient then receives an e-mail with the gift card code. The e-mail comes from a mail form that you create for this purpose.
Once the e-mail has been sent, the gift card is active in the system and can be redeemed immediately.
The system sends the e-mail when the following prerequisites are fulfilled:
- The sales order contains no errors
- The e-mail address of the recipient is available
- If an external payment service provider is used, the payment must be confirmed
When you sell a Gift Card, the system creates a corresponding gift card account. The account contains information about the amount that is currently available on the gift card, and about all postings, for example, the redemption of partial amounts. The number of the gift card account corresponds to the gift card ID.
There are various ways you can call up gift card accounts, depending on your business role. A method common to all roles is to call up gift card accounts in the transaction history of the sales order or of individual gift card items.
During Gift Card Redemption, the customer will use the gift card as a payment method. For those cases, the only difficulty that can occur is if the purchase amount is higher than the gift card amount. Then, two types of payment methods will be used. For e.g. by using the gift card, if anyone places an order, then during import of this order in your ERP, two G/L accounts will be affected. One for the Gift Card G/L account & the other one can be anything like Credit Card, Cash, Bank transfer etc. etc. For gift voucher redemption, may configure one or more discount condition types for:
- Deducting the Total Price
- Posting to required G/L account
Customers can redeem one or more gift cards when paying for a sales order. If desired, you can create a sales order directly from a gift card that you select from the search results list. If multiple gift cards are entered in a sales order, the system debits the gift cards in the sequence of entry. If the amount debited from a gift card is lower than the available amount of this gift card, the balance in the gift card account is reduced by the debited amount. If the sales order value is higher than the available amount of all gift cards that are entered, the customer can pay the difference amount with another payment method.
If the customer decides not to redeem a gift card after you have added it to the sales order, they can remove it as long as the sales order has not yet been saved. In this case, the system reverts the gift card balance to what it was before it was added to the sales order. If you have already saved the sales order and the amount for posting has been consumed, you must cancel the sales order to reload the gift card.
When customers do not know the ID of the gift card they want to redeem, you can enter the gift card code in the Gift Cards assignment block.
If you are redeeming a gift card for a customer who is not the person who purchased it, they likely do not know the gift card ID. However, the customer can provide the code that is printed on the gift card, which you can then enter in the sales order. The system uses the code to retrieve the gift card ID.
If Customers Returns a Product that they have paid for using a gift card, the returns processing follows the standard that you have set. The gift card is not reloaded. As for processing redemption, use a different payment method (condition type) for ‘paid by gift voucher’, which will post amount from ‘gift voucher liability’ to ‘sales’.
Now, you can easily integrate your ERP and Ecommerce Store to automate the business process!
You may also like:
Ecommerce – ERP Integration : 5 Challenges to Overcome
7 Types of Data to Sync Between your ERP and Ecommerce
Top 3 Strategies for Managing Ecommerce Returns
