Hi guys,

Zen cart has been great for us overall, but we'd like our Gift Certificate functionality to work a bit differently than it does out of the box. I understand we're going to have to do custom coding for this. My question to the gurus on this board is do you have any tips, key files, guidance etc for our proposed changes? Or perhaps there are folks who have done similar customizations or seen modules created that do something similar? I have looked around and found nothing.

Here's the way we'd like it to work:

A customer purchases a gift certificate on our site. They enter the name, email address, and a gift message during the purchase (probably on the page where the GC is purchased, and not during the checkout flow). Upon successful checkout a gift certificate email is sent to the recipient. The gift cert has a unique alphanumeric code. We want the gift cert credit to be linked to that unique alphanumeric code. A person can enter that code during the checkout flow (on the payment page) and redeem all or part of the credit. If there is still credit associated with the code it should remain available to be used. If the amount of the GC doesn’t cover the full amount they have to provide another payment method for the difference.

This also dictates that a person has to have a way to check the value associated with that gift card/credit. Perhaps on the page where they are purchasing they gift card there is also a section where they can enter the code into a text box, click “check gift cert credit” and have the credit appear (could be ajax so refresh isn’t required)? Since we don’t want to require an account for purchase (we're implementing Check out without account), even a GC purchase, then we need to have a way to check the credit apart from the “My Account” section.

In many ways this is a hybrid of current Discount Coupon and Gift Certificate functionality already in Zen Cart.

Any thoughts/tips appreciated. I have a feeling we'll have to create something very custom and might not be able to leverage a lot of what's already been built but not certain. We'll be digging into this either way...

thanks,
Don