Printable Gift Certificates

noel_x99 · #1 (**permalink**) 02-28-2006, 09:19 PM

I have a customer interested in selling gift certificates on her site. She wants her clients to pay online and be able to immediately print a nice looking customized gift certificate. (She does not want an invoice/table layout sort of look.)

She wants a variety prices of gift certificates.

Each certificate will be customized with a unique number, recipient name, and a "note" to the recipient.

My customer wants an attractive, nicely designed certificate. It's also important to her to have it immediately available for her client to print it.

I'm thinking that generating a PDF on the fly is the best way to create a printable gift certificate.

Does anyone know of a cart or other gift certificate solution that could work?

Thanks.

frogmanandy · #2 (**permalink**) 02-28-2006, 10:56 PM

We issue tickets for activities over the internet and use pdf which seems to work pretty well.

We set up a template but we do have to change the numbers and info by hand, I would probably recomend using multiple confirmation numbers to guarantee that no one prints their own.

jestep · #3 (**permalink**) 03-01-2006, 08:32 AM

You could definitely use php or another program to generate a pdf on the fly.

I have seen a few companies do it, where their gift certificate is an elaborate picture / promotion, with a white box somewhere on the page. They dynamically generate the pdf with the picture as the background and use a separate layer to fill in the code in the box of the certificate. I don't think it would be extremely hard, but I haven't seen a program that does it.

I would check hotscripts maybe, and keep asking around. I'm sure that something exists out there.