How does gift card support work in the order fulfillment process?

Starting from the fall 2023 update of RetailVista ERP, gift card support has been added to the fulfillment process. Where manually activating gift cards in RetailVista POS was previously necessary, it can now be done automatically. The sale of digital gift cards can be completely automated, while the sale of physical cards only requires scanning them as part of the packaging application. To use this functionality, the 'Sales Orders Plus' license is required.

The following settings need to be configured for this to work properly:

- If not already present, create separate products for digital versus 'Physical' gift cards. The indication for a digital gift card is set in the 'Gift card type'. Associate a product with the appropriate gift card type so that RetailVista can differentiate between digital and physical. This distinction is necessary because sold digital gift cards can be automatically processed by RetailVista, while physical gift cards still require a manual action, namely scanning a physical card that will be activated.

- Specify in the sales order classifications that digital gift cards can be automatically created by RetailVista, and also indicate which gift card definition should be applied for that type of gift card. It is very important to coordinate this setting with any webshop providers, as there may be situations where they have already created a gift card as part of the ordering process. If RetailVista is allowed to take over this role by activating this setting, then the CMS must definitely stop this functionality.Otherwise, there is a risk that a customer will receive 2 or more gift cards while only 1 has been ordered.

Now, when a sales order is created with one or more digital gift cards, the digital gift card line(s) will be split into separate reservations. These reservations will be marked with the indication 'Auto fulfillment'. This means that these reservations can be processed by RetailVista without the intervention of a user (and/or a packing application). The only exception may be if, for example, full payment has not been made and the customer is not a debtor. In that case, the reservation will remain and must be manually processed into a delivery on account. In this separate reservation, one or more digital gift cards will be generated and linked to the corresponding reservation lines.

For physical and digital cards, RetailVista ERP is built in such a way that the linked gift cards are automatically activated when converting a reservation into a delivery on account. The only thing that needs to be done in the packing application in case of ordered 'Physical' gift cards is to scan one or more gift cards if they are part of a picked reservation. The packing application will link these gift cards (in a non-activated state) to the reservation, after which the processing of that reservation will automatically activate these gift cards.

All gift cards (both digital and physical) can be viewed in the new 'Gift Cards' tab in both the sales order and the reservation. As long as a reservation has not been converted into a delivery on account, the gift cards will be visible but will still have the status 'Not activated'.

If an email address is provided with a gift card (mandatory for digital gift cards), an outgoing email will be automatically created when the gift card is activated. These types of emails will be automatically sent through the task scheduler. By combining all the above functionalities correctly, it is possible for a consumer who has ordered a digital gift card in a webshop to automatically receive an email with the requested gift cards within a few minutes after the order has been sent. In order to enable this automatic sending, it is mandatory to set a reporting layout for the 'Gift card type' so that the report is sent as a PDF attachment in the email.

It is conceivable that in case of a bug in RetailVista or a forgotten setting, automatic reservations may not be converted to invoice deliveries. Therefore, it is advisable to create a task schedule that converts all 'Automatic' reservations to invoice deliveries on an interval basis. This task schedule evaluates reservations marked as 'Auto fulfillment' and reservations where it is set in the sales order classification that reservations can be automatically converted to invoice deliveries. To prevent a bug from causing the invoice delivery to fail (or the same missing setting), the reservation is marked as 'Auto invoice delivery failed' so that it is not picked up again by the task scheduler. The task schedule should be of type 'Auto reservations to invoice deliveries'.