Selling vouchers
You can sell Gift Vouchers. Vouchers are considered as good as cash, they are not restricted to certain days or certain collections like discounts are, and any leftover balance can be applied to other orders. When a customer purchases a voucher they receive a 12-digit code that can be redeemed for products and services later. theimagefile takes care of all the voucher details — sales, delivery to buyer, balance-tracking, and final redemption.
There are two types of vouchers which differ in how they're priced:
- "Voucher (automatically fulfilled), Buyer Chooses Amount" has a default price, but the buyer can choose any amount during checkout. This is the best general-purpose voucher.
- "Voucher (automatically fulfilled), Fixed Amount" has a specific price chosen by you, and the buyer cannot change it (though he can purchase multiples by changing the quantity). Use this when selling a voucher for a specific future purpose that has a fixed price, like a voucher for a future portrait sitting or prom photo package. You can also include Fixed Amount vouchers in a Package, for example bundling prints or downloads with a voucher for future work.
Create your voucher sale item
Go to My Sales > Item Library. Click to create a new sale item. Select a Special Digital Item:
Then select the type of voucher you want to sell.
Add the details of your sale item, and Save
Add your new sale item to a price plan
Now you have the sale item created you add that sale item to a price plan. Either by including the new sale item into an existing price plan or creating a new price plan:
Make the price plan Public
INnthe price plan "Setttings" tab, scroll down to <1>3. What Buyer Sees and enable the option"Storefront Page: list stand-alone items on a public, discoverable, search-optimised page". (Why do I do this?: Price plans vs. Item Library vs. Public Storefront Page)
Create the page to sell your voucher
Visitors can purchase your voucher from your price plan, however you can also create a page specifically to highlight the product, increase your SEO and sell the voucher. Go to My Websites > Pages > Create New Web Page. Select the Stack tab and create a Shopping Stack page.
Use the link to link to an individual item or category
Then select your voucher product from the drop down list
Add any other required information to your page. Save and test
Q:Why don't you send a big voucher photo by email rather a link? - A: Because we do all we can to make sure that the email voucher arrives with the recipient. Adding big photos with very little text in the email is like waving a red flag at an automated spam bot, and the email is likely never to get to the recipient.
At My Sales > Direct Payments > Vouchers you can also create unlimited vouchers and provide the Voucher URL links to your customers.
From your Direct Payments > Vouchers page you can click to "upload a dedicated banner image". Anything uploaded there will display at the very top of the printed or PDF view. If nothing is uploaded then we display your Site Header logo image. For the normal web-view (with your branding), we show the dedicated banner image at the very bottom of the page, but there we don't fallback to Site Header logo image as it is usually shown at the top of the page already.
The print and PDF view is black-text-on-white without loading your branding but does include the dedicated voucher banner image.
Notes
- Vouchers can be redeemed in any shopping cart checkout, regardless of the underlying collection or price plan (i.e. vouchers don't need to be spent in the same collection where they were purchased).
- If a photographer has any vouchers created at My Sales > Direct Payments > Vouchers then every shopping cart checkout will include a prompt for "Add a gift card or promo code or voucher".
- When a customer is buying a voucher from a collection, the customer has the choice to associate the Voucher URL with that collection, and its enabled by default. (Use case would be: you want to buy prints for grandma, but can't choose the best one, so you buy a voucher instead — and want grandma to have one short URL link to redeem the voucher and complete shopping in that private collection.) This association is done using the Access Code of the currently-visited collection. If the photographer later changes the Access Code, then the Voucher URL will no longer grant access to the collection.
- During checkout, the customer can also add an optional message which is shown on the Voucher URL. This is a plaintext message, but any URL entered will be made clickable.
- When a photographer does an admin-create or admin-edit of a voucher at My Sales > Direct Payments > Vouchers, the photographer can associate the voucher with an Access Code, but he can also directly associate with a collection from a dropdown of all collections, and this latter type of link will endure even if the Access Code is changed over time.
- When a Voucher URL is shared, another Access Code can be appended to the end of the URL after the slash, like https://www.example.com/v/nn/v123456789012/superSecret. When viewing, if there is a collection whose Access Code is "superSecret" then it'll be linked to from that page, and its sample image will be shown. (All of these collection-association methods can be combined together, so a single Voucher URL could link to a variety of collections.)
- Vouchers together with Digital Downloads are considered "auto-fulfil digital items" and they share some special properties. A customer purchase consisting entirely of these digital items will never have a shipping charge and will bypass partner lab notification (even if sold as part of a partner lab price plan). The customer making the purchase will typically see usable, clickable links for the Voucher URL and Digital Downloads on the final order confirmation page (so he doesn't need to wait for email), but the order notification email will also include those links as well. However, if the customer paid via Offline Payment or Mailed Cheque, then the links won't work until after you mark the order as Payment Verified (but you can change this). Also, if you're selling from a price plan configured to use Proof Delay on digital items, then the links won't work until you mark the order as Approved or until the Proof Delay time interval expires.
Comparison with Price Plan Discount Promo Codes
Each price plan at My Sales > Price Plans can have multiple discounts created, and these discounts can optionally require a "Promo Code". You can create sets of multiple promo codes, and they can be good for single or multiple uses. When customers are shopping on your website, the single prompt for "Add a gift card or promo code or voucher" handles both these old-style discount Promo Codes and the new-style Gift Card Vouchers.
Previously, some photographers used the Fixed-Amount price plan discounts with a one-time-use Promo Code to provide similar functionality to our new Gift Card Vouchers. However, the price plan discounts had these limitations:
- Could only apply to the item subtotal, but never to shipping charges
- Could only be used once, and any leftover balance was lost
- Had to be manually created by the photographer and then emailed separately to the buyer of a voucher
- There was no way for a buyer to check the balance
- Could only be spent in one price plan
Our new Gift Card Vouchers address all these limitations by maintaining a Gift Card Voucher Balance that can be checked anytime at a Voucher URL. The Voucher URL includes an optional gift message from the purchaser or photographer and can include a link (plus sample photos) to a collection where the voucher can be spent. A buyer going to the Voucher URL will have their browser automatically remember the Voucher Number, so it doesn't need to be separately entered during shopping cart checkout.
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