Bookings Overview

Website Builder’s native Bookings solution makes it simple for small businesses to accept and manage appointments directly from their websites. The solution integrates seamlessly with site themes for a polished, responsive design, and supports workflows and templates to help agencies create booking-enabled sites at scale with minimal manual effort.

Bookings includes the ability to add staff members as service providers who can accept unpaid or paid appointments. Bookings also integrates with external calendars, helping businesses stay organized and reduce no-shows. Designed to grow with your clients’ needs, it brings advanced booking capabilities into one flexible, native solution.

To get the most out of Bookings, we recommend you read our articles in the following order:

• Set Up Bookings. This article explains how to add Bookings to your site, create appointment types, add staff members, design the Bookings widget, and upgrading to a plan that allows you to start accepting appointments.

• Manage Bookings. This article explains the various actions staff members and attendees can take after Bookings is set up and your business is accepting appointments.

Bookings Use Cases

Bookings works best for businesses that sell scheduled services in person or online. Many businesses even start with a free consultation or assessment to understand a customer's needs before the main service.

Common Bookings use cases include:

• Spa, wellness, and beauty: Hair salons and spas offering services with different durations, such as haircuts, massages, facials, aromatherapy, and other treatments.

• Home services: Businesses like HVAC, plumbing, cleaning, or electrical services that allow customers to book repair, maintenance, or in-home service visits at a convenient time.

• Fitness and training: Personal trainers, coaches, or instructors offering 1:1 sessions or small-group training (in person or virtual).

• Professional services: Virtual consultations in different time lengths with specialists such as accountants, tax advisors, or other professionals.

While the use cases listed above are the most common, the possibilities for Bookings are endless.

Bookings Terms

Following are terms used in Bookings:

• Appointment type. The type of appointments that can be booked. Appointment types can be anything the staff member with Bookings admin permission sets up as available appointments. This is also where the appointment’s name, duration, location and additional settings are configured. For example, an appointment type could be a woman’s haircut at a hair salon.

• Attendee. The end user who attends the appointment. For example, the person getting their hair cut is the attendee at a hair cutting appointment.

• Booker. The end user who is booking the appointment. This is often the same person as the attendee.

• Bookings admin. Name of the permission that allows a client user in the Website Builder platform to manage all aspects of Bookings.

• Bookings widget. The Bookings widget displays the calendar where users can select an appointment date and time.

• Organizer. The staff member who the appointment is scheduled with.

• Staff member. The person in the business who attendees book appointments with. For example, a beautician is the staff member at a hair salon that you book a hair cut with. Staff members are added to the Website Builder platform as clients with the Bookings admin permission.

Bookings Permissions

Following is the permission specific to Bookings:

• Bookings admin. This permission allows a Website Builder client user in the platform to manage all aspects of Bookings, including staff members, booked appointments, and calendars. Note the only task that a client user with the Bookings admins permission cannot complete on behalf of a staff member is connecting to the staff member’s personal, external calendar.

Attendee Bookings Experience

Following is the typical flow for attendees when booking an appointment:

1. Attendee visits your website and selects an appointment type, staff member (if applicable), date, and time in the Bookings widget.

2. Attendee fills out various fields the business configured, enters their payment information (if applicable), then submits their booking request. Note that if the appointment is paid, the attendee will be charged immediately, even if the appointment is pending approval.

3. The attendee receives a popup confirmation on the screen that includes the appointment type name, names of the attendee and staff member, date and time (including timezone) of the appointment, name and email of attendee, and the location of the appointment. For pending appointments, attendees receive a popup that confirms their appointment request has been sent to the staff member along with the same details as the confirmation popup.

   • Attendee can click Reschedule at the bottom of the popup. They are directed back to the calendar to select a new date and time and fill out applicable fields, such as Reason for rescheduling. A popup confirms their appointment was rescheduled and displays the new date and time. Once the popup is closed, the attendee can only reschedule using the link in their confirmation email.

   • Attendee can click Cancel at the bottom of the popup. They are prompted to confirm their cancellation, then another popup confirms their appointment has been canceled. If the attendee closes out of the popup before canceling, they can still cancel from their confirmation email.

4. Attendee receives a confirmation email confirming their appointment, reschedule, or cancellation. Email contains all the same details as the popups in the platform. Note that attendees can also cancel or reschedule their appointment from the appointment confirmation email.

   • It is important to note that for pending appointments, attendees only receive a confirmation email once the staff member manually accepts their appointment request. Or if the staff member declines the appointment request, the attendee receives a cancellation email.

5. If the appointment is virtual, the attendee joins the appointment by clicking the link in the confirmation email. By default, virtual meetings use Cal Video, however virtual meetings can be configured to use Google Meet, Zoom, or Microsoft Teams.

To learn about the staff member experience, see Manage Booking.

Bookings Limitations

Following are the current limitations while Bookings is still undergoing development and testing:

• Bookings cannot be installed if you also have Third Party eCommerce installed. However, Bookings is compatible with Native Store.

• If you are accepting paid Bookings, it is important to note that Stripe supports credit cards and wallets, and Mollie supports credit cards, Apple Pay, direct debit, giftcards, and Paypal.

• If you also offer products in store, discounts can be applied to both Bookings and store products. Currently, there is no way to specify if a discount can only be used on Bookings or products.

• If you use automated taxes, you cannot add a tax code to the category of the service. Instead, the default tax rate is used.

• While Bookings can support a wide variety of use cases, we do not recommend using Bookings for hotel reservations, rental management, or restaurant reservations. A helpful way to think about it is that Bookings is best for booking time with people, not objects or things.