Store Credit

Hmmm. Yeah, good point.

Without getting into any customizations, the obvious idea would be to make a dollar worth 100 points (pennies), so to get $4.75, you'd have 475 points.

Yes, I agree, the RMA system is great for that.  We already use it extensively and being able to issue a store credit or issue a refund through the RMA system would be lovely.   It would be really nice to have some kind of reporting of RMA's on a date range basis too 

I think the misunderstanding here is what you are selling. In the case of cpgmar... you're selling plants so it is unlikely that you will have the same customer purchase from you every month. As for Katharina... you charge a re-stocking fee which makes me think you sell more expensive items that require time/effort to re-stock. This subject is on apparel. Most people who shop for clothing online do so frequently and since everyone is looking for bargains, we have to keep the clothing priced low and cannot charge to re-stock. I have many customers that make an order every week or two when we put up new merchandise. That being said, many of my customers don't want a refund because it takes several days to process and is not instantly available in their bank accounts. A store credit on the other hand would be instantly available in their online accounts once their return is received so they wouldn't have to wait to receive the money back on their card to make an order, especially in the case of exchanges where I want them to re-purchase the right size they need because we are not responsible for the re-shipping fee. They would be able to log in right away and purchase the new merchandise that they want before waiting to see the refund and having the items be sold out. I actually moved to PC from a custom shopping cart I had which had the store credit features and the rewards points feature as well. The store credit would automatically be applied to the person's next order and they would be able to choose whether they would want to use their rewards points or use some, not all. On top of that, we were also able to give them a discount. Everything was split into their own parts. The way it is set up now, I would have to write an extensive email to my customers explaining why all of a sudden, their rewards points don't make sense and what happened to their previous rewards points. They only see one number so they won't be able to know whether we computed everything correctly for them or not unless we broek it down for them in an email which would cause confusion and distrust in our company. Basically.... a store credit should differ from a reward. People like seeing their rewards and this shouldn't have to be manually altered my me in their account.

Katharina, you are absolutely right.

Store credits are more and more infrequent in the retail world because they royally upset the customer (and it has never happened to me personally to see one used on an e-commerce store that I have shopped at).

Customer expectations are exactly the ones you indicated in your message, and you are right in saying that this is probably the very reason why this feature has virtually never come up as a request by other store managers using ProductCart.

Massimo

Edited by earlyimp - 11-May-2010 at 11:23pm

Sean,

It is a good idea to use "Reward Points" as a "Store Credit", but can you name just one respected apparel store who can not issue a "Store Credit" for a customer and will just dance around with points or something else? We are trying to present our web sites as a professional and trustful business, even we can not spend thousands of dollars for SAP or else... As for a shopping carts priced at $199.00 and up it is not the right forum to name just 8-10 of them. But, they are out there.