To offer gift certificates your customers can purchase start by creating a "Gift Certificates" product. Set the products visibility to "Online: Standalone," which which will allow it to be purchased on its own (no ticket required). Also, select the venue and/or event pages you want the Gift Certificates to be available on; this will add a products tab to those pages where the customer can find and purchase the gift certificates. (Note: you can link directly to the products tab by adding #products to the end of the URL.)
There are two ways to configure how customers select a quantity or amount. We recommend having them select the number of participants, so that it will line up with the number of tickets to be discounted later.
Set a single price for the product and allow customers to select the quantity. This lets them pick any number of people they want, and works well if your tickets are always the same price.
Set up variants on your product for different group sizes at their respective prices. You get to set the options they have to buy, so this works better if you have discounted rates for larger groups.
Gift certificate recipients will need to use a promo code to redeem their gift certificates. The promo codes should be set up as a 100% discount with the Total Allowed Uses set as the quantity purchased by the customer. Depending how many gift certificates you expect to sell, or how you'd prefer to handle things, there are two options available for promo code creation and delivery:
Manual Creation and Delivery:
If you expect gift certificate sales to be slow, then it can be easy to monitor and manage the codes yourself. Gift certificates generally are not used until weeks after the initial purchase, so it can even be a routinely scheduled task.
The first important step here is to make sure you have the Send Alert Email About Every Ticket Sale setting selected on your gift certificates product, with Attach Ticket to Alert Email also selected. This will send all of the customer's order information including # of gift tickets purchased and their Ticket ID you can use for the promo code. When creating the promo code enter the Ticket ID as the Code and the number purchased as the Total Allowed Uses.
To provide customers with the instructions for gift certificate redemption use the Ticket Instructions; this displays on the ticket, so it will be right in front of the recipient. You can also use the Email Message (sent with receipt) to also have the information in the initial email they receive.
Upload Promo Codes and Automated Delivery:
If you expect a high volume of gift certificate sales, then you can upload the promo codes in advance and use Zapier integrations to automate their delivery to customers.
The first step is to create your list of promo codes and upload the list onto your account. Then, keep a copy of the spreadsheet that will be used for delivering codes as they are purchased.
Automated delivery will be handled by using our Zapier integration. The Zap will trigger when a customer purchases a gift certificate ticket, move down one row in the spreadsheet, and send that next code to the email address provided by the customer. Here are the trigger and action steps to setup the delivery Zap:
Trigger: Passage Ticketing - Connect your account, and select your gift certificates event as the trigger.
Action: Increment Value - Pick the app "Storage by Zapier" and leave the action event as "Increment Value". Then connect/choose a storage account (used for adjusting to the next value), and set the Increment Amount to "1".
Action: Lookup Spreadsheet Row in Google Sheets - Pick your program (Google Sheets is recommended) and select the name of your spreadsheet and specific sheet number/name. Then, select the Increment Value option as your Lookup Value. This will navigate so the Zap is looking at the correct row and cell.
Action: Setup the outbound email. This can be done with email services like Mailchimp or Constant Contact, or the internal "Email by Zapier" (note: Email by Zapier will have a monthly sending limit). The email can be populated using the email address collected from Passage in the trigger step #1 and code from the spreadsheet row lookup from action step #3.
