Gift Certificates (Part 1)

I have read the threads on creating gift certificates and am currently trying to implement this on my clients website. I have a few questions, so I think it would be less confusing to concentrate on one issue at a time. I am using Powerstore 1.0 and I have the eCart extention.

I added the gift certificates to the products table(Ex. $10, 15, $25, etc.) and want to make sure the user is not charged for shipping on the gift certificates but still charged for normal products.

Currently, we have shipping levels setup ($0-$10 is $3.95 shipping, $10-$20 is $7.50, etc.)

I was able to add a new shipping rule in eCart to make certain product ID's free shipping. This works great as long as only gift certificates in the cart...

But when you add any other product the the cart (not gift certificates) it bases the shipping on the subtotal and shipping is charged on the g.c.'s.

How can I make this happen?

I think one way you could do this would be to create a new calculated column that will be a total price for shippable items. You would need to have a column in the cart that would indicate if an item were shippable then create the calculated column based on the value that is present in this shippable column. Then in your charge rule you will use the subtotal of this new calculated column rather than the sub total for the entire cart.

I know this is lite on specifics so please post back with any questions that you have or if you just need some more detail for any part of this.

Thanks for your help... I was able to add another column in the ecart object for "shippable items" (I use a checkbox, using 1 for shippable & 0 for not shipped). I am a little confused on the calculated column. What is this for and how do I use it in the ecart shipping options?

Not sure if this is possible, but... Could I just use the the column I created to do this? I tried adding in another shipping rule for each of the different levels... For Example:

First Shipping Level (0 - $10)

Subtotal of Items > 0.01
And Subtotal of Items < 10.00
And If Session variable Shipping == 1

This did not work, but I was not sure where to go from here.

With your current rule in place you would need to ensure that you have that session variable set as well to make the charge.

What I was referring to with the calculated column is that you have a new calculated column created in the calculations tab of your cart.

If the name of your column that holds the 1 or 0 for shipping is called shippable items then the calculation would look like this:

name: totalshipping

abs([shippable items] == 1) * ([Price] * [Quantity])

Then in your shipping charge rule you would just use the subtotal of this new calculated column to base your shipping charge rules on and not the subtotal of the entire cart. This will make you shipping charge rule based only on the items that have a 1 for the shippable items column.

Sweet! That did it.

Glad to hear it, using calculations in combination with charge and discount rules can give you a lot of flexibility when it comes to deciding how you would like to accomplish something.