It's amazing how little info there is out there about CRE Loaded features/hacks. The book that costs $40 hardly covers anything in depth.
Here's a conversation about setting up gift certificates or vouchers on your site. If you have a CRE Loaded site, you should set this up. It's free, and just one more way that you can market your site by giving away free gift certificates to bloggers and popular social media account owners in exchange for a review or promotion on their site. This is a great way to build links and get some viral buzz going about your site.
Mahesh: Hello, how can I help you?
Srini Venkataramani: Hey Mahesh, a customer wants to buy a gift certificate from the site. How do I turn that feature on?
Mahesh: Hello Srini
Mahesh: You need to create a product for that and set model name as GIFT_25, GIFT_50 depending on the certificate price you want
Srini Venkataramani: Model number?? what is that?
Mahesh: Thats your product model number field , you will get that whe you create products through admin
Srini Venkataramani: Ok, trying now
Srini Venkataramani: I created a product with model GIFT_25. What should I set as price? How does it work, meaning, how will customer receive a code that is worth $25?
Mahesh: You can sell these product with any price and your customer can send this to there freind as a gift voucher
Srini Venkataramani: So when customer buys this gift cert, how will they send this to their friend? And how does the friend redeem the certificate?
Srini Venkataramani: Mahesh, are you there?
Mahesh: Hold on please
Srini Venkataramani: Sure
Mahesh: when customer buy it, its still pending then when admin gets payment they go to Gift voucher queue and select the voucher and redeem it so its released to the persons account
Mahesh: e they update the status to delivered first then gift voucher queue
Mahesh: then redeem it, after that the balance will be on the customer account to use or send to friend
Srini Venkataramani: Hmm..I guess it would be nice to have some kind of tutorial or screenshots of this process. Makes sense to me but a but confusing. I guess I can test this with a product priced at $0, right?
Mahesh: No I will suggest you to test with $0.01.
Srini Venkataramani: Ok, will do. Thanks for your help!!
http://www.simplosys.com/blog/yahoo-store-as-an-seo-friendly-ecommerce-platform
Like many web developers and SEO's, I've always been on the lookout for the perfect Ecommerce platform. CRELoaded is literally LOADED with ecommerce functionality but does not integrate a CMS into it, an unbelievable deficiency in the Web 2.0 world where content is king. Joomla and Virtuemart looked promising but with Joomla sites, you end up spending a lot of time trying a gazillion plugins (components, modules, mambots) that you need to mix and match to make a great site. And then there comes the upgrade and you never know which ones are going to work and which ones will not. And then you also don't know which of your components are supported by the Joomla third party SEO products such as sh404sef or OpenSEF. These plugins are free but often don't support certain components. You need a good Joomla developer that takes the time to keep themselves abreast of the latest in the Joomla and Virtuemart world. Virtuemart is also sort of limited in some key functionality. For instance, it does not integrate an affiliate management feature (there are workarounds, but there you go, more plugins) and does not have recursive billing options built in. These are core features that several stores need.
So, as my hunt for the perfect Ecommerce software continued, I ran into this post, a recent August 2008 post - http://wordpresswebpro.com/seo-tips/yahoo-store-the-best-e-commerce-platform-for-seo/. I am working on a site that is built on Yahoo Store now and I am realizing why this guy is so excited about it. It is pretty good. I am still pretty new to it so I don't know enough about the pros and cons, but it does look promising based on what I've seen so far.
With all the speculation about Microsoft buying Yahoo and even talks about Yahoo not doing so well, I hope Yahoo keeps making it's Store offering better!
Blog 