How do I configure Gift Certs for ANY amount?

After all I have been reading about gift certificates, I see I can have individual products each priced differently or, do it by attributes where again I have to specify the amounts that the customer can choose from.

What if I want the customer to be able to type in any value they want. Even weird values like 99.95 rather than the incremental values like 10,15,25,50,100, etc... Is this possible?

A gift certificate is set up in the same way as a normal product is set up, and therefore needs a static price.

It's not possible to leave the price "open" for the customer to fill in, and besides, this is a bad idea...

... imagine if a customer enters 20 cents for the certificate. It's going to cost you more to process the certificate than what it's worth!

Better to create SEVERAL certificates, with escalating values:

Certificate 1 = $5
Certificate 2 = $10
Certificate 3 = $20
Certificate 4 = $50
Certificate 5 = $100

See how we did it here:
http://www.karenscakes.co.uk/shop/index.php?main_page=index&cPath=91
...and we sell ten to fifteen GC's a week.

Using a static price of $1.00 and letting the customer choose how many they want would allow the selection of $99.95

If you want to allow partial dollars, you'll have to set the product to allow increments of 0.01 and change your store's Stock->Decimals setting to 2 instead of 0.

DrByte:

If you want to allow partial dollars, you'll have to set the product to allow increments of 0.01 and change your store's Stock->Decimals setting to 2 instead of 0.

While technically possible, is this a good idea? As per my earlier post, what if a customer buys a certificate for One Penny? Nothing prevents them from doing this. (Unless a conditional is built into the code that stops them from configuring certificates for amounts under $1... ?)

Your point is understood, and has merit, to a certain degree. However, I would argue that gift certificates have very minimal processing overhead, at least as far as the digital gift certificates offered in Zen Cart are concerned. Limiting the number of choices is prudent though.

And, by default, unless you configure the product otherwise, it requires a minimum of 1. You can change the minimum required quantity on any product via the product-edit screen in your admin.

I concur with fairestcape: it's better to have a limited number of discreet values for gift certificates. Having more choices seems better but in fact is overwhelming and reduces the likelihood of a sale.

I think the best way is to offer one gift certificate for $1. Then they can type any amount they want into the quantity box. The description text just has to describe that to prevent confused customers.

swguy:

I concur with fairestcape: it's better to have a limited number of discreet values for gift certificates. Having more choices seems better but in fact is overwhelming and reduces the likelihood of a sale.