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Having an online store is super easy, especially with the free WooCommerce plugin for WordPress. But if your business is either a hotel, a car rental store or anything that would require a prior booking or appointment, you may need a feature to enable bookings on the website. For this, you can use the booking plugins available for WooCommerce, the booking plugins available for WordPress or independent softwares.
Depending on your needs, you can select any. As for our Booking & Appointment Plugin for WooCommerce, it is easy to install and use, packed with features to make the logistics of your organization easy to handle and suitable for all businesses.
List of the Businesses That Can Use WooCommerce Booking & Appointment Plugin
There are several business types that our plugin can and does cater to. Read on to find if you can and your business can make the switch too.
1. Gyms & Fitness
Whether you’re running a fitness or Zumba studio, a Pilates class, yoga workshops, an aerobics or aerial silk class, a conventional gym or any fitness space; having the booking plugin is a boon. According to your plans, you can allow customers to book the fitness class for one month, one week or even allow them to pay and attend on a daily-basis.
Even fitness consultants who have their website can use the booking plugin so customers can take appointments or book specific slots. And of course, you can choose to not work on holidays and disable those days from the calendar. Flexibility (pun intended) is key, after all.
Get inspired by Body Tech Performance, an athletic training space based in Orlando.
2. Salons & Spas
If you run either a salon or spa, the booking & appointment plugin will sort your whole system. You can use the features of the plugin to charge separately for weekends and weekdays, disallow appointments for holidays or special days and choose to limit the maximum number of appointments per day.
This helps centralize your appointments and you won’t have to rely on manually-maintained excel sheets to check for overbooking. After all, do you want to incur the wrath of a customer who needed to get a cleanup and had to be told that she or he could not be accommodated? This will also set the stage for expansion, as you can have a centralized back-end for all bookings.
3. Health
Now here’s a sector that needs the online booking ability more than anything. Whether you run a hospital, a dental clinic, a nutrition & wellness clinic, a healing center, a veterinary hospital or any other medical practice (save for an Emergency Ward), the booking plugin is a must-have.
That way, customers can know in advance if a particular date or time is available or not. If someone needs to schedule a visit for a routine checkup or a specialized one, they can book online. It will help reduce the number of calls you receive. The plugin will complement the offline structure seamlessly, as you can manually add appointments as an admin too.
Take a look at the Robert Salvit Healing Center based in New York, which uses our plugin to take bookings for their health sessions ranging from energetic bodywork to intuitive healing.
4. Sports Companies
Whether it is an amusement park, a water park, a hot air balloon ride, a scuba diving retreat, a bowling rink, a go-karting track or a combination of them all – the appointment plugin will ensure your customers never have to turn away because of a ‘Sorry we are booked’. Your capacity can be 5 or 5000, the plugin will take care of the bookings, the cancellations and all related hassles. You could use the multiple nights booking option if your business rents trekking, skiiing, scuba diving or camping gear, which customers might need for more than one night. For others, such as go-karting, you can choose the hourly booking option.
Take a cue from our customers such as Panorama Langkawi SkyCab, the award-winning cable car ride in Malaysia and Go Wild Ballooning, a hot air balloon service in Melbourne which uses the plugin to book their premium and platinum balloon flights and Nicco Park, the amusement park in Kolkata. Madrid Outdoor Sports, organizers based in Madrid, Classy Campers, a camp can hiring service in UK, Yogi’s Ski and Snowboard, a gear-renting company from Creek, and Top Diving, a diving school in Puerto Rico, Spain also use our booking plugin.
5. Event & Activity Organizers
Say you own a cinema hall, a theatre space, or organize kids activities, music concerts, tours of cities, wineries, or any other kind of event. The booking & appointment plugin has a feature which allows you to select only specific dates to enable the booking for.
So you can update a monthly schedule, or even a yearly schedule in advance and then not have to micro-manage tickets or tie-up with an aggregator website to sell your tickets. You can also choose how much in advance the bookings can be made.
Get inspired by our customers: Kids at Play, a multi-sensory gym for kids, based in Philadelphia, Dotty Bobbin in the UK and Marjo Jumping Castle Gippsland in Sale, Victoria, Australia. Tour Charlottesville’s Best Wineries and Fabrication Crafts, a creative workspace in Leeds also use the booking plugin,
6. Hotels
A lot of our customers are hotels and hotel owners. Because a hotel is never just one thing, you will need to set up a site with several different types of rooms, each with their own specifications with respect to minimum number of days required and prices. This complexity can be easily managed with the booking plugin. And for smaller enterprises like lodges, hostels, dormitories, bed & breakfasts etc, it’s ease of use is worth the investment.
However, if you only have a few guests each month, or give out a room on a monthly or quarterly basis, we would suggest you don’t use a plugin, as it may not add much value besides allowing for online bookings. In such a case, you can continue with a website alone.
Among our customers are Antler’s Rest, a bed and breakfast in Gelnnallen, Alaska.
7. Food Businesses
It’s all about dining experiences these days – from farm to kitchen to curated gastronomy. But experiences can hardly be en masse. You cannot deliver ‘specially made’ stuffed turkeys by the 100s in a single day, or have a dine-in-the-dark experience with the chatter of a crowded room. For such businesses, the booking plugin will manage your reservations for a month, three months or even a year. Customers can plan their food tours according to the availability shown on the website.
Among our customers are Dining In, a catering business in the Isle of Arran, Scotland, Plant-based Cooking Courses from Hanover, Germany, Hotel Revenge, an escape room combined with a fine-dining experience based in UK, Duck Master, a made-to-order roasted duck service in Singapore.
8. Rental Businesses
Today you can give anything on rent. A conference room, a co-working space, kids party equipment, portable toilet trailers, iPads, video games, your homes, clothing or even cars. Whether it is for an hour, a day or for multiple nights, you can install this plugin on your online WooCommerce store. Your customers will simply log in to your site, check for the availability of the products and book accordingly. Especially if you want to rent out more than one property, this plugin will help you manage everything.
Get inspired from our clients; Bag Packer, a Mumbai-based company that rents out travel equipment, Style Theory, a clothing rental store from Victoria, Australia, Kids Party Hire, a toy and party hire company from Mt Albert, Auckland and RentCARES.com, a rental company.
9. Facility Management
As a facility management firm, you have a lot of segments – electrical repairs, plumbing, cleaning, pest control, tiling. And not just our homes, our gadgets need services all the time too. With an online store, you can allow customers to pick and choose the service they require on a given date and time slot. You can also change the settings based on requirement.
Say it’s Christmas time and you know that the demand for these services will be higher. You want to increase the number of available slots for those days and also charge differently. The customer can now easily book a carpenter for say 18th of December, just in time for the house to shine bright and clean. Our customers are Condo Lisa in the Greater Toronto Area, Smart Geeks an information technology company in Washington DC and Bautrockner Griem, a company renting industrial equipment such as channel compressor and water separator, in Germany.
10. Consultants and Professionals
As a practicing lawyer or accountant, a photographer or a designer, you are likely to be flooded with calls each minute. You can surpass all this by allowing your clients to set up prior appointments with you or your firm online with the booking plugin. At the very beginning, keep an online presence but be approachable offline. This will help you build client relations.
But after you grow as a company and the moment you start getting more than 20 appointments a day, you know you should completely shift to a more longer-lasting system.
Take a leaf out of the book of KPharoah Fotographia, a photography studio in USA which uses our booking plugin.
11. Book A Car
Learning to drive can be difficult, but booking for it doesn’t have to be. Simply install a booking plugin so customers can easily book the correct time frame and time slots to be coached. You can use the multiple nights option to choose the minimum number of days equivalent to the coaching period.
And since we are on cars, why not also take your garage online? No one need wait in queues for a quick fix or clean-up, right? While you may still want to allow customers to come without booking, it will help build a neat online portfolio for your business.
12. Day-Care Centers
Run a babysitting center for kids or animals? One thing you need to do less is maintaining a schedule of the little ones and when they will be with you. Let the booking plugin do that, and you can concentrate on feeding and cuddling them. Sounds like a fair deal to us!
The best thing about being online is reach. Instead of being accessible to a small group of people, the global marketplace is yours. And don’t worry if your business was not on this list. We are looking for ways to make our Booking plugin work with numerous businesses and will be happy to work with you on that.
We also have a demo setup of the Booking & Appointment plugin, with ready configurations for different types of services, which you can check and see for yourself.
