variable product costs / discounts from vendors

[ChrisKraus]

ToPS,

In many places, including Illinois, gift cards may not legally EVER expire. Nor can the value decrease except by using the card to purchase stuff.

This means that you have to keep track of the value of your outstanding gift cards FOREVER! If you issue a gift card and the customer's great, great, great, great, great, great, grandson brings in the gift card 150 years later it must still be honored and you must still be able to find the value in the card even though you have replaced your POS system 15 times and the POS system that issued the card will not run on any computer manufactured in the last 75 years.

What fun!

Same in Massachusetts

[ibmsystems]

Almost the same here in arizona they must be valid for a minum time of 5 years before they can either expire or loose value and they can only loose value once a year AFTER they go past the 5 Year Requirement

Going back to the "Gift Cards dont make sense" thing

One point many POS Software Manuf. Point out about Gift Cards is that they can create Viral Marketing (Wikipedia It)

[daleadmin]

Rollerball,

The case for Gift Cards.

1. I cannot think of any major, medium, or even most small retailers that do not offer gift cards. Since all of those folks have expended considerable time, money, and effort in order to be able to support gift cards there must be a compelling business reason for gift cards, i.e they make major profits from the selling of gift cards.

2. Most POS users want to have those profits also. Gift card profits may not match your definition of "profit" but that is just fine for everyone else.

3. Many potential users have informed me that DHPOS is completely unusable for them without a gift card feature. Not so for your receiving/price change feature.

4. X-Charge is a method of having DHPOS process credit cards directly without having to use other hardware. Gift cards is an intrigal part of X-Charge. No gift cards, no X-Charge.

So while I may admit that your feature could possibly be useful for a really small percentage of DHPOS users, delaying gift cards is like delaying the developement of the internet because you really want them drop that to work on a better shoe lace. A shoe lace is useful but nowhere near the usefulness of the internet.

Yep, from my email and chat it is that big a difference in favor of gift cards.

[ibmsystems]

Question for Dale:

In order to use Gift Cards will i have to go get a Retailer account with X-Charge (CCom) or will DHPOS do it internally without the X-Charge Account?

[daleadmin]

ibmsystems,

Internally first, but if you have two or more stores you will only be able to use the gift card in the store that issued them.

Then eventually you will be offered the option to use gift cards through X-Charge and then you will be able to use the gift cards at any of your stores.

You will also be able to print gift certificates that will have the value of the certificate printed on it. However then you have to worry about counterfit certificates produced by customers. They would literally be printing money, <u>your</u> money.