Gift Card improvements

Customers need an automated way to check their remaining balance on gift cards without having to contact us and wait for us to respond (a major annoyance to both parties).

We'd prefer the ability to link gift cards to a customer account and have remaining balances be accessible in the "My Account' section. At least provide some portal where they can enter their name or email plus the card code and retrieve the balance, which would also work for gift card owners that don't have a customer account.

Also GCs aren't set up very well to meet our needs for store credit. We provide drop shipping service to other retailers. They receive returns from their customers (the consumer), and then return to us for store credit. So we're constantly issuing store credit to our same customer accounts. To keep from aggravating them with a new random GC code each time, we set up a gift card for say $500 the first time, but then immediately edit the available down to the store credit owed, say $45 for example. This gives us plenty of room to play with moving forward to reload to the same GC code if the next return is larger, or they haven't used up the past issued credit yet, etc.

The problem is the first automated email says "you have received a $500 GC". Even if you use the "resend email" feature after changing the available balance, the email still states "you received a $500 GC". We need the automated email to state the available balance (in this example "You have received a $45 GC").

Alternately, the ability to reload the GC with more than the original balance would work well I'd think (not sure why that limit was implemented in the first place). In the above example, we could then simply issue a $45 credit the first time, the automated email would indicate they received $45 (not $500 like now), and the next time if the credit needed to be say $80, we could still do that on the same GC code it that limit was removed.

We'd also like the ability to add notes that the customer can see to the GC each time we reload it, summarizing what was returned. Currently we can only enter a "special note" that the customer can see when we first set up the GC. After that, we are not allowed to edit that note or add any additional notes that the customer can see (we can only add an internal note that the customer can't see).