WooCommerce Bookings and Appointments - Sell your time like a Pro

WooCommerce Bookings and Appointments — Sell your time like a Pro!

While running an online business with a booking system, it’s not difficult to set yourself up for some failure. A poor booking software, some improper payment gateways, and an unsustainable order management system can really turn down your dreams to build a self-growing booking website.

Luckily, in recent years many decent WordPress booking solutions have started to show up. They are reliable, simple to use, and doesn’t really give you much of a headache while handling multiple bookings. As a consequence, many business owners take interest in downloading these plugins and try adding the booking functionality to their website.

How much do I need to spend?

Well, it depends.

If you are planning to set up a dedicated booking system and hire admins, then you might have to spend more money. You have to buy a premium bookings plugin and have to sit long hours just to set it up.

But, if the bookings can be managed with fewer interactions with your computer then go for a free plugin. This way you won’t need a huge and costly booking setup, and eventually, save up a lot of money.

But, why use a free plugin at all?

No additional cost: When you look at it from an investment point of view, the overall setup cost is negligible, except the usual maintenance cost of internet connection, servers, etc. And usually, these plugins don’t want you to pay any additional or hidden price. Which means, no monthly or yearly subscription amount. Just download from the WordPress repository, install it and start using it.

Quality assurance: Another untold benefit of using a free plugin from WordPress is that they don’t usually have any quality issue. The free plugins undergo a strict review process and the people who review the plugins are highly talented. They examine and test these plugins before adding it to the list.

No hard feelings: For one, you won’t feel that bad after finding out that a free plugin is just not good enough. But you will be really disappointed if the paid version is unsatisfactory. You would then have to either contact the plugin author to return your money or set out again to find another plugin, which is just another headache.

Cue in the WooCommerce Bookings and Appointments

The WooCommerce Bookings and Appointments plugin is one such free solution from PluginHive. This plugin takes its inspirations from many real-life business cases, and thus, has good practical implementations. It notches right up by offering features that only few premium(paid) plugin have.

What are the benefits of using the Bookings and Appointments plugin?

Unlike any other bookings plugin, this one is versatile. Meaning, it doesn’t matter what kind business you run or want to run, this bookings plugin can change its shape accordingly. This is because of the multiple features and functionalities that come along with it. Let us go through some of the major advantages of using this plugin on your WordPress-based website.

Bookings are always open:

This is probably the best thing about this plugin. Your customers can book the services and products 24×7. This way when you are out on a holiday or simply want to take work to your home, your customers won’t have to wait for you. They can easily go to the product page and book the dates right then and there.

You can set non-working hours or days:

Always open for booking doesn’t necessarily mean that you cannot add breaks. This plugin allows you to add non-working hours that lets you set breaks in-between the working hours. So, if you don’t work for one hour every after then you define it in the plugin settings. Not just that, the plugin also allows you to set weekends as holidays. This way you can choose between Saturday and Sunday, or define both days as holidays.

It offers multiple booking periods:

The plugin comes packed with some of the most commonly used time periods used for booking — Minutes, Hours, Days, and Months. This way you can set up a 50 mins yoga class or even a 2 hours spa session if you own a spa business.

Not just smaller businesses can benefit from this, big-scale businesses like hotels, resorts, and other accommodation services also make use of this plugin to handle bookings. And yes, the plugin is capable enough to handle the multiple bookings. If you own one such business, then you can define bookings based on days and even months. You can also show the calendar range bookings on the product page.

Set up product level bookings:

This is a very unique feature and is probably the best thing about this plugin — it lets you set up bookings on the product level. Meaning, you can go to individual product page and define the products as a bookable product. What’s even interesting is that you can sell normal items along with your bookable items. This is a good way of upselling additional items, and it sure can help earn few extra bucks alongside your usual bookings.

And it will help save money:

It is a fact that in almost all offline booking business, payments are a major issue. Some people book a service over the phone or email and later choose not to show up. This can cause a lot of issues and is not good for your income. No show-ups tend to harm businesses that especially requires pre-arrangements, like wedding planners or party organisers.

Thankfully, WooCommerce comes pre-packed with some amazing payments gateways that let your customers pay for the bookings. People tend to show up to places if they have already paid for a certain service or resource. And if things don’t go right for them then they always have an option to cancel the booking. This particular solution can help many businesses in various different ways.

Final words…

Somewhere in the midst of finding the ultimate solution and struggling to build a robust booking system, we don’t realise how simple the process can be with a free plugin. And clearly, the article goes in the same direction as well.

So, if you are thinking to add this booking functionality to your WooCommerce and expand your business in many ways then check out this plugin now.

It’s free.

WooCommerce Bookings and Appointments - Sell your time like a Pro was originally published in Hacker Noon on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.