How can I issue store credits in Magento CE?

Question

I want to know, is there anyway that customers can have funds added to an account balance and then use their balance for shopping?

Don’t need buy coupon, gift or some things like these…

I want they add an amount, for example $50 in the field and then redirect to bank(for example paypal) , pay and after that their balance show :

Your Balance : $50

How can I go about this in Magento CE?

Answer 1

Magento doesn't do this out of the box. What you want is somehow a gift card extension but the giftcard is not sent but used by oneself.

Implementing this is a lot of work, because you have to pay attention to a lot of things:

1. Buying funds (should be a product)
2. Not paying for them, so they don't get processed to the customers balance
3. Buying something with the funds
4. The amount is not high enough, so you have to mix different payment methods
5. This is the part where you want to implement distributed transaction, because of the below described case*
6. People send the things back, so you have to refund part to the customers balance and part to the creditcart/bank account/whatever second payment method (s)he used

Bad case

Order1: Customer has 50$ fund and buys something 100$ worth, he choose paypal to pay with, he is redirected to the paypal site to pay 50$.

Order2: In the same moment, he opens a second order, shops something for 49$, pays with his fund, everything is fine

Order1: The customer pays the 50$ with paypal, he comes backend and the order is flagged as paid ... ERROR.

In this case, you want to rollback the whole transaction, refund the 50$ paid via paypal and refund the maybe decreased 50$ on the funds.

This is technological a mess and I don't think it is worth to implement it correctly. Often companies decide, it is not needed to cover the above case, then it is not soo much work, but still a lot. Be careful with this.

Answer 2

Explaining how to build an extension like this would be a bit too much for one answer cause, as Fabian explained, it involves a lot of work. One way to go about it is work something out with coupon codes per user (there are extensions for that) or a virtual product that doubles as a coupon code but this will require you to either write some code to create the coupon when someone purchases the product or manually add the code.

For this one I would advice to look at the already existing extensions. First of all because since it's such a tricky thing to build yourself better get something that has been proven to work and second because they're not that expensive. Probably the hours you'll spent on building itself won't weigh up to the cost of the extension.

Both Mageworx and Mageworld offer an extension for this