Our strategy has been to offer automatic credit card processing options that didn't require sending the GC buyer to a different site to complete their purchase. The rationale being that the GC buyer is more likely to complete an order if their confidence in the buying processes is maintained and thus increase conversion.

Imagine a GC buyer who starts at site A and is sent to site B to purchase a GC and is then sent to site C to complete that purchase. It's easy to see that each time a buyer is redirected to another site with a different look-and-feel that the likelihood of losing the sale increases. For SpaBoomers that have a Dynamic Website, the look-and-feel of purchasing a GC is exactly the same as the rest of the site. For Linked-in GC pages, we make efforts to maintain the look of your site to minimize the effect of the redirect.

However, the feedback from SpaBoomers hasn't been ignored. I'm happy to tell you that we DO have in the development pipeline the addition of regular PayPal accounts (Website Payments Standard) and Google Checkout. We're also looking into the possibility of adding additional payment gateway support (for example PayPal Payflow Gateway) that would work with your existing Internet Merchant Account and would provide another option to Authorize.net.

Additionally, PayPal and Google have started adding features that allow you to have some control over what their checkout pages look like (mostly colors, logos and such). While this is not preferable to completing the purchase without redirect, it does help.

I can't tell you when these new features will be ready, but we'll certainly keep you updated. If you have any feedback or suggestions, please let us know.

If SpaBoom collected the money, i.e. used our merchant account to charge for the online instant gift certificate transactions on your website, it would create a number of significant legal and financial challenges.

First, SpaBoom (and not your spa) would show up on the customer's CC statement. Not only does this mean SpaBoom would carry the contingent liability burden (i.e. if a chargeback occurred, we'd be on the hook), but the chance of chargebacks would increase because customers wouldn't necessarily know who SpaBoom is when they reviewed their CC statement.

Second, and more problematic for SpaBoom, is what happens if a spa decides to stop accepting its Instant Gift Certificates (i.e. goes out of business)? If we've sent all the money, at the time of purchase, to the spa, how do we get that money back if outstanding Instant Gift Certificates need to be honored? In other words, if Spa X decided to stop honoring their Instant GC's, the holder would try to get their money back (either by chargeback or coming to SpaBoom). We'd need to give these customers their money back, or direct them to another spa. Either way, we'd need the money (already given to Spa X) to satisfy the customer.

The way to solve these two issues, would be to keep the money from sales until a GC is redeemed, as well as keep the unredeemed money to cover against future liabilities (a topic for a deeper discussion). We could do this, but we're operating under the assumption most spas wouldn't want this type of financial arrangement with SpaBoom.

What are your thoughts? Do you see another way around this, or would you be okay with SpaBoom keeping money until Instant GC's are redeemed?

Lori, I'm sorry I didn't address this more specifically in my article above. Basically, there are three components to fully processing an Instant Gift Certificate. IGC Delivery, CC Processing and IGC Tracking. For "tracking," I'm referring to IGC validation, redemption and reporting.

1. IGC Delivery: SpaBoom does this via email or print, unless you also set SpaBoom to provide a "mail option" to purchasers. For the "mail option," we'll give you all the information you need to mail out one of your preprinted, retail based GCs to the recipient.
2. CC Processing: This is the topic of my article above. We support "manual" (where you log into SpaBoom to get the CC info) or "automated" (where we send the CC information directly to your merchant account).
3. IGC Tracking: I think this is the basis of your question, and you appear to be wondering where/how SpaBoom forwards all the relevant GC information to your POS. Let me address that now.

SpaBoom is a robust IGC management tool, and you can manage your IGCs for you. If you would rather manage your IGCs offline, you have many options. Most often, spas manually enter the information into their POS. On rare occasion, I've heard of spas printing individual IGCs, and keeping them in a 3-ring binder.

If you use Harms Millennium, SpaBoom can automatically push your IGC sales information directly into Millennium. Read about it here. If you have a different POS, we cannot unfortunately do this automatically at this time. Sorry.

So, in summary, having an online merchant account just deals with the CC processing issue, not importing the IGC sales data into your POS.

If you have further questions about this, please do not hesitate to contact me directly.

I am not sure if they mean our webmaster (which is me) or SpaBoom… but I'll share 50-50 credit!!! Just wanted to add this to give other spa owners an idea of how a simple, optimized site can be really effective.

Larry.

I don't want the divulge the specific number, but it's a good size (worth my time writing the article). While there appears to be a number of reasons a spa will sell well (or not) over the Internet, it seems the following are consistently major factors:

1. Great website. Not just great looking, but fast, SEO friendly, geared to sell, and pushing Instant Gift Certificates front-and-center.
2. Working hard in marketing. They have a strong marketing program, online and off line. They do everything they can to push customers to their websites (i.e. web address in ads, voice mail, etc).
3. Lastly, but not always, larger or longer-term players. We have lots of exceptions to this, but this does appear to be a general rule.

I would love to hear comments from our other customers about this.

Larry.