Store Credit

We are in a clothing business, and our customers often return purchased items in reasons of sizes and such. Instead of loosing a sale and issue a refund, we would rather offer a customer a Store Credit. In the way PC works, we can only offer a customer a "Coupon Code" or "Gift Certificate". 1. It takes extra time. 2. Customers wanted to see their amount of "Store Credit" before they would start shopping again. 3. Most of the time they would go for a "Refund" instead of "Coupon Code" or "Gift Certificate". It would be very convenient for a customer (and it is a very common practice) to log into her/his account and see the amount of Store Credit. And at the checkout a "Store Credit" will be automatically applied.

Excellent ideas here.

We're already gathering notes for the specification of an add-on like this.

I'm expecting that handling a store credit balance will be complicated in the new OPC, and I haven't yet looked into what implications there might be here for payment gateways, but I'm thinking that we could play quite a bit off of the logic built into PC for gift certificates for this (in as much as they also maintain an account balance).

I also like Katharina's idea that reward points and this proposed store credit show prominently when a customer logs in.

The other part about is that showing the "small cart" may not be viable for most existing designs; however, there are two interesting options here:

1. Version 4 of PC introduce and new notification popup when customers add to cart. Messages could be added here.
2. WMS is about to release a "drop down mini cart" to handle the "add to cart" event, similar to how Gap.com does this. Messages could be added here.

Both of these options would allow space for these messages without any significant resign of a site's current layout.

I'm definitely interested in other ideas on this subject.