Has anyone sold discounted Gift Certificates before? For example: Buy a $50 Value Gift Certificate for $40. If so, what is the process that was used? Is it a Pricing Rule? Or some other process within Tessitura?
Thank you!
Hey Jolene,
Since Gift Certificates aren't done in an event, you wouldn't be able to apply a pricing rule, I don't believe. Gift Certificate transactions, technically, all take place in the payment window. You could build a price type that offsets that additional amount (for your example, that extra $10). This would require some tricky web coding to make work though I imagine. You could do this as an event, however, someone would have to manually return the seat of the "gift certificate event" to get an amount to apply to a gift certificate.
Hopefully in future versions of Tessitura, cart discounts can be applied to things like gift certificate purchases.
- Chris
The main issue is that Gift Certificates are a Payment Method. They are not a Price Type on a Performance (Chistopher's "gift certificate event") that you can use with a Pricing Rule.
My main question would be, would you sell these online?
If only by phone/onsite, then it could be doable.
Unfortunately, there is no "easy button" solution.
I've definitely had to ponder this before, after some creative marketing brainstorming...
The problem is illustrated when you consider what happens next, after the gift certificate is purchased. When they spend that $50 on a performance, does all $50 get allocated to the performance ticket GL? If so, where did the extra $10 come from? You would have needed to expense it from _somewhere_ when setting up the gift certificate in the first place--a little bit like a subsidy. If only $40 gets allocated to the performance GL, then you're not really selling a discounted gift certificate; you're selling a regular gift certificate and a limited-use opportunity to buy tickets with a discount.
The subsidy option is probably easier to implement, since tessitura doesn't have a built-in notion of a single-use "coupon code" that could unlock a discount.