Coupons and gift certificates are implemented in planyo using the coupons feature (
site settings / coupons). This feature makes it possible for your customers to purchase multiple entry passes, passes valid for X months, rentals/services paid upfront for X hours (e.g. 10 hours of tennis court access), buy gift certificates to be used for your services, or have an account (personal or company account) with you so they don't need to make a payment each time they make a reservation. All these uses are possible with the coupons feature.
In order to offer coupons to your customers, you'll first need to set up your coupon types in site settings / coupons. There are 4 types of coupons to choose from:
- amount-based (e.g. worth EUR 100 or $100). Here the end customer purchases a coupon/gift certificate for given amount which they can use to pay for their reservations until the credits available drop down to zero. At that time they can refill the coupon credits by making another purchase. This can be used to make quick reservations without the need to make online payments at each reservation. Another usage of this coupon type is a company account for employees using your services. All employees could then use the same coupon code. Amount-based coupons are also great as gift certificates purchased for other people.
- based on number of hours. Similar to amount-based but for a specific price the customers can purchase the possibility to reserve your resources for free for the total duration of X hours. Could work very well for appointments (like massage therapy etc.), tennis courts, boat rentals etc. Such coupons not only make reservations quicker but also you can offer your customers a discount compared to your regular pricing.
- based on number of entries. Very similar to hour-based coupons, for example you can offer 10 massage visits for $150. Here it's the number of entries (or rentals) the customer purchases without considering the duration of each rental/visit. Usually this is preferred if your duration is fixed, such as 10 entries to a movie theater or 10 online lessons.
- valid for X days. Here your customers can reserve as much as they like for rentals taking place in the next X days. This is great for weekly/monthly/yearly passes. E.g. a fitness studio can offer such passes so the customers can come whenever they wish in the next 30 days.
- discount valid for X days. Similar to the previous coupon type but here instead of allowing the customer to book without any fees within the duration of the coupon, the customer must make a payment but the price is discounted. You set the discount as a percentage.
Coupons also have additional features:
- Coupons can be assigned to given person (oneself or to another one as gift certificate) -- the person here is identified by their email address. Another possibility is that when the customer purchases a coupon, they assign a code which can be entered by anyone (great for groups/company passes). Yet another possibility is a combination email/code where both must match. This could be chosen for higher security. These choices are up to your customers.
- You can decide which resources given coupons will work with
- You can make coupons obligatory for some resources (you do this for each resource in resource settings). This means that normal reservations with a single payment will not be allowed. This is useful if you want to allow reservations only for e.g. an entire semester where the customer signs up for X months and only then can make reservations.
- You can limit a coupon to be personal only. Personal coupons will not be usable by persons other than the coupon holder and will not be usable when making a reservation for multiple persons. This is very useful for e.g. personal passes to a fitness studio.
- Entry- and hour-based coupons' validity can be also limited to X days. As with the valid for X days type, the validity date can start on the day of purchase or can be chosen by the customer as a future date.
- You can include custom questions in the coupon purchase form. They can be used to ask for any additional information you may require from the coupon holders (or also the buyers in case of gift certificates)
Once the coupon types are defined, the end customers can buy their coupons on a special page (go to
Integrate with my website / widgets / buy coupon in order to get the html code for a simple A HREF link to the coupon purchase page). Another possibility is to use the tag $(buy_coupon_url) (see
Q206 for the details) in any of the email notifications or templates. This tag will be replaced with the URL of the page where the coupons can be purchased. Please note that the new mode to purchase coupons by end customers works only with planyo modules/plugins version 2.1 or higher. You might need to upgrade your planyo module/plugin first (or you can of course have your customers purchase the coupons on planyo.com).
Once a coupon is purchased, you'll see it listed on the
view coupons page. Here you can also administer the coupons or insert new coupons in the name of your customers if they pay offline or for your tests.
Coupons which are used-up (with no credits left) can be refilled by customers by making an additional purchase. If for example a customer purchased an amount-based coupon and has $5 left on it while the reservation costs $10, they'll need to refill their coupon in order to make a reservation. If they refill by purchasing a coupon worth $50, their balance will be $55 so the $5 from the previous balance will not be lost.
If a reservation which used a coupon was cancelled, then based on your setting "Credit back coupons on cancellations" found in
Site settings / Active features, the coupon may be credited back with the amount used by the reservation.
If you use a meta site, note that coupons defined in the meta site context are separated from coupons defined in the site. This means that a coupon added in a meta site cannot be used in the site context and vice versa.
Email notifications
On the
Notifications page you can set up messages sent when a coupon is purchased (the
Online payment for coupon received event).
You can choose to send the message to the client as well as to the site owner, a resource administrator or the main moderator.
In case of the client, the message is sent to the email address of the coupon holder (the
Email address of coupon holder field on the coupon purchase page).
When a coupon is purchased as a gift card, you can additionally send the
Gift card buyer message.
By default, for gift certificate purchases the
Online payment for coupon received message mentioned above is not sent to the client (gift card recipient).
This is done with the
$(if)$(is_gift_certificate)$(then).... conditional statement at the top of the default message body.
In this case, the
Gift card buyer message allows you to send the buyer additional information about the coupon and how it should be delivered to the recipient.
Additionally, you can also send a PDF attachment in the message. This way you can create e.g. a gift card file that the buyer can send to the coupon recipient.
The
Gift card buyer message is sent to the email address of the coupon buyer (the
Buyer email address field on the coupon purchase page). When this message is set up
in your account, this email field becomes obligatory when the coupon is purchased as a gift card.