Last updated - February 24, 2020
When you consider starting an online store, you will realize selling physical or digital products is not the only option. There are several other ideas that you can try out. For example, you can offer a service through your website, for which you can accept appointment bookings from customers. Or, you can rent out an event space or guesthouse by accepting bookings through your website. Though the idea may seem really straightforward, setting up a systematic booking system may prove to be complicated. WooCommerce Bookings plugin is an excellent choice to set up a booking site without hassles. In this article, we will look at some of the interesting use cases of this popular plugin.
First let’s take a quick look at the features of this plugin.
WooCommerce Bookings
With the help of this plugin, you can sell appointments or rental bookings on your online store. It’s a great option for websites of accommodations, event spaces, tourist attractions, grooming services, fitness classes, etc. The plugin helps you allow your customers book on your site according to their convenience. You can set a fixed time slot for booking according to your preference, or let the customers choose what time suits them. The plugin makes it extremely easy to make specific time periods unavailable on your calendar, based on your vacation plans.
You can very well use the scope of dynamic pricing with this plugin, as you can provide discounts for bookings of larger duration, early bird offers, higher rate on weekends, etc. The plugin also makes sure no service or rental space is booked beyond its capacity. For example, once you get a booking, you will assign the specific resource (room, equipment, or service person). That resource will not be available for booking at the same time slot again. So, you really won’t have to face the hassles of double booking.
Furthermore, the plugin gives you the flexibility to choose the workflow of the bookings. Either you can allow customers to directly book, or keep a review step where you take a look and approve the booking. Same way, you can choose to offer free cancellation option to your customers. It also helps you to send reminders to customers, when a booking date is approaching. You can also create a manual booking for customers who call over the phone or walk in to book an appointment.
The single site subscription of this plugin would cost you $249. The 5-site subscription is $299 and 25-site is $449.
How to create a bookings website for your rental space?
One of the basic use cases of this plugin would be to create a bookings for a rental space. For example, you have a room that you want to rent out for events with a maximum size of 50 people. You may have a set of parameters to set this booking.
For example:
- The space is available on all days of the week from 10:00 to 22:00 except Sundays.
- On Sundays, the availability is only from 15:00 to 22:00.
- Each booking can be for a minimum duration of 4 hours and a maximum duration of 12:00 hours.
- The rate is $5 per hour, and if the booking is for 12 hours, it is $4 per hour.
- The maximum number of people attending should be 50.
- Customers should be able to opt for additional options like audio visual equipment, food and drinks, floral decoration, etc.
First, you can create the event space as a bookable product, just like any other WooCommerce product. In the product settings, you set it to allow your customers to pick the booking duration.
In the Availability option, you can set the time range specifying the availability of the space. For example, on Sundays it is not available from 10:00 to 15:00. So you can make that time slot not bookable. If you want to make any other dates not bookable, you can do these in the settings page.
Now, how to add the additional services associated with the event space booking?
For this, you need to get another extension which is fully compatible with WooCommerce Bookings.
Product Add-ons
You can create additional product details along with the main product. It offers different fields for you to let customers choose what they want to add. This plugin supports different fields like text input area, checkboxes, radio button, select boxes, etc. You can also create a required field, or give an option to customers to upload a file as attachment.
You can purchase the Product Add-ons extension from the WooCommerce marketplace at $49 for a single site subscription. 5-site subscription and 25-site subscription would cost $79 and $149 respectively.
This extension will help you add additional options for the event space, such as audio visual equipment, food and drinks, floral decoration, etc. You can set a specific price for each of the options. When the customer selects any additional product, it will be added to the order.
How to create a booking site that offers entry to a tourist site?
Another common scenario where you can use the WooCommerce Bookings plugin is when you want to create a site that offers entry tickets to a tourist site. The criteria for this would be:
- The place will be open Tuesday to Sunday, 10:00 to 17:00. Mondays closed.
- You want to charge different rate for visitors – Adults ($10), Seniors($5), Students ($5), Children ($3), etc.
- Special discounted rates on weekends, and public holidays.
- Bookings should be closed for a day when the number of visitors reach 200 on a particular day.
- Visitors should carry a copy of the booking receipt with a barcode to gain entry to the site.
You can create a bookable product, that has fixed blocks of days. Now on the ‘Availability’ section, you can restrict the number of bookings per day to 200. And, make Mondays not available for bookings.
Then you can add the reduced price for weekends and public holidays in the ‘Costs’ section.
After that, you can set the varied rate for different visitors under the ‘Persons’ section. You can create different options like Adult, Senior, Student, Children, etc., by clicking the Add Person Type button.
Now, you need your visitors to print and carry the booking receipt to gain entry at the venue. How will you do it? There is another plugin to your rescue.
WooCommerce Order Barcodes
This plugin helps you generate a unique barcode for every order placed on your site. The barcode will be auto-generated when an order or booking is made on your store. And, you can send it in the order completion mail that goes to customers. You get to choose the type of barcode you want to generate too. It includes three barcode types that need a standard USB barcode scanner. Two other types, Data Matrix and QR code, works with digital scanners and mobile devices.
You can purchase the single site subscription of this plugin from WooCommerce marketplace at $79. 5-site license is $129, and 25-site license is $179.
When the visitors are at the gate, you can quickly scan the barcode or QR code to verify their bookings.
How to set up the website of a hairdressing salon?
Now, let’s look at the possibilities of setting up a hair salon’s website. Let’s say the salon is open from 09:00 to 20:00 every day. And, there are 5 different stylists, which customers can choose based on their preference.
Here’s how you can do it.
You can use the WooCommerce Bookings plugin to create five different resources corresponding to each stylist. The Available Quantity of the resource will be set to 1. Now, you can set the availability of the salon based on its opening hours. In this example, the opening hours is the same for all days of the week.
After this, you can create the Appointment as a bookable product. Booking duration will be a fixed block of one hour. You can add each of your stylists in the Resources section by clicking Add/link resource button. Then, set the availability and cost of each resource. On the front end, your customers will be able to choose a specific stylist, and a time block of their choice.
How to create a gym membership with specific activities that members can choose?
This is somewhat a complex case, and you will need multiple plugins to handle this. Here is the criteria.
You want to sell gym memberships, and offer special activities like zumba or pilates for members. Here’s how we can do it.
In addition to WooCommerce Bookings, you will need two other plugins to achieve this scenario
1. Groups for WooCommerce
This plugin will help you create memberships for customers based on a product they purchase. You can find the best use for it when used along with Subscriptions plugin, where a recurring charge is deducted for the membership. The membership will be active for the customers as long as the subscription is alive for them. The plugin costs $79 on the WooCommerce marketplace for a single site subscription. 5-site subscription is $99 and 25-site is $199.
2. WooCommerce Subscriptions
This is one of the most popular WooCommerce extensions. It helps you create subscription products on your site, for which you can charge a recurring fees. You can offer free trial periods and charge upfront sign up fees too. It also helps to create variable subscriptions, where your customers can choose from multiple subscription plans. Your customers will also have the freedom to upgrade or downgrade a subscription plan according to their choice. It helps a lot in creating a steady, recurring income on your site. Moreover, it helps you achieve innovative business models by combining with other plugins.
A single site license of WooCommerce subscriptions would cost you $199. 5-site license is $249 and 25-site is $399.
Managing the gym membership and additional activities
First, you need to create a Group for all the members who will subscribe to the gym membership. This is to help and create restricted access for them for additional activities they choose. On the Capabilities section of the Groups plugin, you can create a new capability as ‘Gym membership’. You need to add this to your WordPress site by accessing Groups from the navigation panel.
Now, you can create a new subscription product, and set a price for it – for example $100 per month. In Product Data metabox, you will have the option to select the corresponding group for the subscription. You can select the gym membership group created earlier.
So, now any of your customers who purchases the subscription product, ‘Gym membership’ will get access to the group as well.
The WooCommerce Bookings plugin comes into picture when you want to include additional activities like zumba dancing or yoga to the gym membership. You can create these bookable products, and set a booking duration, available days, and price. Under the field, Enforce read access, you can choose the ‘Gym membership’ group. This will make sure that only members who have subscribed to the gym membership will be able to view these additional activities created by the Bookings plugin.
Conclusion
WooCommerce Bookings plugin offers great scope in setting up an appointment or bookings site. It offers you a chance to sell appointments for services like counseling sessions or hair styling appointments. You can also offer booking options for event spaces or accommodation facilities. Recurring plans like gym memberships too can make use of this plugin to sell additional services to subscribed members. Hope this article has offered you a few ways where you can use the WooCommerce Bookings plugin to its fullest capacity. Let us know if you want to share a unique use case that you encountered while using this plugin.
