Gift Certificate Types

SpaBoom uses GC Types to broadly classify Gift Certificates sold for billing, tracking, expiration and promotional purposes.

GC Types for Billing

SpaBoom classifies the GC sales it makes over the Internet as GC Type “Gift Certificate (on-line)”. It is only those GC Types that will incur charges from SpaBoom.

This means you can use SpaBoom to manage your retail (or any off-line) GC sales without additional expense to you, and still reap the SpaBoom benefits of:

  • Automatic tracking of all your GCs, including redeemed and non-redeemed GCs.
  • Management of your GCs.
  • Online marketing to all your GC customers, not just those who purchased online.

GC Types for Tracking

Many of SpaBoom's Reports (located under the Reports Tab) are categorized by GC Type, which can give you a bird's eye view of your offline versus on-line sales.

GC Types for Expiration

You can tell SpaBoom how long your default/normally sold GCs should be valid through GC Types, using our Modifying GC Settings Help Topic.

But, what if you want to have a limited time, promotional GC that is only good for, say, 2 months?  Easy!  Your organization can sell, offer or promote different GCs with different expiration dates (by assigning different GC Types to those GCs).  There are two steps to offer a special GC type on your Instant Gift Certificates page:

  1. In your GC Types list, add a new type and specify Sold Via:  On-Line, and set your custom expiration limit.
  2. In Basics, go into the "Not So Basic" settings at the bottom of the page, to the "Instant Gift Certificates" section.  Change your Online GC Type to your new special, and that will be the type that is sold by default on your webpage, until you change it back.

After your promotion period is over, just change back the Online GC Type to the original setting and you'll be selling with your default expiration date again.  This way, the GCs will be kept separate and you don't have to worry about the expiration date of any already-sold GCs being edited.

Important Note:  Do not change the expiration date of an existing GC Type - that will change the expiration date of any and all GCs that have already been sold under that GC Type.  This is obviously a bad move, for legal and customer-service reasons!

If you need to use different expiration dates, follow the steps above to create a new GC Type and start selling GCs under that new GC Type.

Please contact us for any help regarding expiration dates.

GC Types for Promotional Purposes

Consider using SpaBoom GCs for your next big promotion! You can print out retail-based GCs from SpaBoom -- which don't cost you anything -- reduce the expiration date on those GCs, then use SpaBoom to track the success of your promotion.

Example: You normally do not expire your GCs. However, you want to give free GC's to a local radio station as a promotion, but you don't want those GCs out there forever, so you'd like to expire the radio station GC's after 6 months. The solution is to create a new GC Type, labeling it “Jan-06 Charity Promo” (for example), with a 6-month expiration date , and print out or email as many of those as you need. SpaBoom does not charge you for those GCs.

Note that a FREE GC will have a Paid Value of $0, but it will still have a Face Value of whatever service or dollar amount you assign to those GCs.

Once those 6 months have come and gone, you can use SpaBoom's reporting feature to assess how many GCs were actually redeemed, thereby gauging the level of success of your promotion.