Do you have a PDF “blank” of an award or certificate or gift certificate you wish to add custom data to on-the-fly? Maybe this is a gift certificate needing an amount, name and order number printed on it, or a graduation certificate needing a name, date and a degree printed on it. If you have a WordPress site and are using WooCommerce, Easy Digital Downloads, Download Monitor, keep reading because this is easier to set up than you would think, using PDF Ink.
This can work for any type of PDF document, whether it be a diploma or an award—or you name it. Additional text or images can be added to existing PDFs using software libraries included in PDF Ink. Selling/distributing via WP e-commerce allows you to accept credit cards, PayPal, Apple Pay, etc., track sales/inventory, etc., but also collect and store customer information required to add customized text to these files.
Here are the steps to creating customized downloadable/printable PDF Gift Certificates for your customers.
1. Design Your PDF
First you’ll need a PDF of the document you’d like to distribute online. To give you an idea of what I’m talking about, here is a webpage of free 8.5×11″ PDF samples a lot like these pictured:
If none of these look quite like what you need, you’ll need to pull on your creative gloves and get to work. Make a PDF document which your customers will be pleased to print and present as gifts. Leave a couple areas on it where you might print customized text. This is what will make your certificate special.
As an example, here is a certificate we designed this month for Sierra Mountain Center (SMC), an outdoor guiding company in Bishop, California. We used topographical map contours for the background, and some fancy border to make it feel fancy:
2. Decide Where To Make Your Mark
On the certificate we designed, there is a white boxed area on the upper edge where a watermark can be added. (It could also be added to the “To” and “From” fields, but I’ll leave that to the purchaser.) In that white box, a custom gift code can be printed, and/or maybe an expiration date (if that’s legal in your state). That’s where we are going to watermark a code based on the order number. When redeemed, the gift certificate can be verified as valid by checking that code against the e-commerce order number. Sierra Mountain Center’s gift certificate is a WooCommerce “variable” product (with gift certificate dollar amounts being variable). So, a customer chooses the dollar amount of their certificate, goes through the checkout process, and is delivered a watermarked PDF which they can print and share at their discretion.
For our SMC PDF, we want to print a special code in the box along the upper edge. Using magic tags in the placement content, PDF Ink allows you to add customer- and order-specific data to each PDF, on the fly:
- Customer name (first, last or both)
- Customer phone number
- Customer email
- Date
- Order number
In our case we will use the [ORDERNUMBER] magic tag. In the PDF Ink frontend placement settings, our content is simply
[ORDERNUMBER]
but when a customer purchases a PDF certificate and downloads it, their unique order number is added to the PDF. To then add a expiration date, we’d add the following PDF Ink future date magic tag to our placement content:
[ORDERNUMBER] exp: [DATE-366DAYS]
Now the purchase date plus 366 days will print on the certificate. Magic!
The plugin will allow you to use different font styles, font sizes, and colors so that your certificate looks just how you need it. The watermark can be moved around the page, millimeter by millimeter to be placed where you need it. And in case you need it in more places on the page, PDF Ink allows for multiple watermark positions (placements).
3. A Finished Certificate
Now each time the certificate is downloaded, PDF Ink will take the magic tags in the content settings and convert them to order/customer data. The e-commerce plugin retains control of downloads (serving, counts, permissions). PDF Ink is only responsible for watermarking the PDF (or EPUB) product.
Here is an example of a finished product, with the watermark circled:
Benefits of Selling Digital Gift Certificates
What’s especially nice is the customer gets a certificate instantly which they can print how they like, when they like, or just share digitally as a PDF via email. Your office spends no time or effort on ordering, shipping and handling paper cards, but income trickles in and word spreads.
Another great thing about delivering certificates digitally online as PDFs is that customers can return to their account portals (https://yourwebsite.com/my-account/ by default, with WooCommerce, for example) to re-download their PDF later. The customer is not “out of luck” if they have lost their card, and yet they do not necessarily need office help to recover it.
Win win!