Do you use the booking widget on your website and other platforms? This is where you can completely control how and when customers can book so that you can save more time.
1. Where to find the settings
Go to the Settings > Calendar > Online bookings to find the settings that you can adjust for your booking widget. On the right side you can see all of the different setting categories and see how it will look like when implementing the settings. After making any changes don't forget to click the 'Save' button.
We'll deep dive into the different categories below.
2. Main settings
Booking widget & email language: here you can choose the language your clients see when booking online and receiving emails. Note: all clients receive it in the same language, you cannot provide different options to different groups.
Booking option: Choose if a customer can directly book online or if they have to request an appointment first and wait for your confirmation. You can also choose to apply it to either all customers or new customers only. This is what a booking request will look like in your calendar (see screenshot):
Employee selection for online bookings. Indicate whether you want customers to be able to choose a specific employee or not. You can also opt to show the employee selection option as the first step in the booking widget.
Services: Customise what your client can see in the booking widget such as price or duration of the service you offer. Maybe you have certain services you want to highlight, click 'Highlight top services' and choose your top 3 so that they see those first in the booking widget.
Notifications: Check this option if you want to receive an SMS notification on your phone. This is an extra reminder, as you will always see it in your online calendar and receive an email notification.
3. Schedule management
Here you will find some options to further control customer's options when booking online.
Online bookings interval: this determines how often you want to offer time slots to book online. If you set this to 30 minutes for example you will see options every 30 minutes to book online. This is an example of what it could look like in the booking widget:
Minimum time between making the online appointment and walking in. Determine how far in advance the customer can schedule an online appointment before walking in. The range goes from 'none' (you're okay with last-minute bookings and walk-ins) and 48 hours (you like to know in advance who is coming).
How far into the future can customers book online. This can vary from 1 week (your schedule is always changing or you want to have more control over your calendar) to 12 months (you know your schedule well in advance and have already blocked out your own free time and holidays).
Prevent gaps in your calendar. You can enable this options if you don't want to offer time slots all throughout the day. Here you can choose to show options after and/or before other appointments/items that are already in your calendar.
By enabling the waiting list (only available in Basic and Pro subscriptions) customers are automatically entered on the waiting list. So that as soon as there is an empty spot in the calendar you are able to fill it up easily.
4. Customer information
You can ask customers to fill in extra details before completing an online booking.
Address details. Here you can specify whether customers should enter their address details or not when making the online appointment. You can make the setting optional or required.
Date of birth. Set whether customers can optionally enter their date of birth when making an online appointment. Or make it mandatory if needed. This might be important to know when booking services like permanent make-up.
Newsletter & Terms. You can give customers the option to subscribe to your newsletter. Customers need to agree to your terms and conditions when booking online, here you can add a specific link to your own terms and conditions page on your website.
5. Online payments
❗️Note: this option is not available in the 'appointments' subscription, only for 'basic' and 'Pro'.
Here you can indicate whether customers have to make a (partial) payment in advance when they make an online booking via your booking widget. To do this, you have to enable the integration with Mollie first via settings > integrations > Mollie. Read more about that in the Mollie help article.
You can choose for full online payments or deposits. For both options you can choose to make it mandatory or optional and for new customers or for all customers. A new customer is recognised by a new e-mail address that is not yet in your customer database. If you choose to ask for deposits (partial payments) you can also choose the percentage that customers have to pay over a booked appointment.
6. Style and sharing
In this section you can customise the way your booking widget looks on your website.
Choose the colour. As a default we use Salonized 'Paradise Pink', but you can adjust this to your own branding colour.
Schedule view displays your availability per week or per month and week in the booking widget.
By clicking on show an option for customers to check their appointments, customers receive an email summarising their previous appointment overview. For clients often booking the same treatment, this comes in handy to prevent them from booking the wrong one and having to call to clarify.
Besides you can also add a customised alert into your widget if desired. Here you can add a short message like 'New prices coming in July 2024'.
Tracking. Here you can add your Google Analytics ID for tracking purposes.
Sharing. Here you can find the link to your booking widget for social media use and the code to add the widget to your website.
Create a custom booking widget. Do you want to make an additional booking widget for a specific category or set of services? Click on 'Create your custom booking widget' and create your own personalised widget.
Click Save and you are all ready to go with your customised booking widget.
If you want to know how to add the booking widget to your website click here.
Do you have any further questions about the settings?
Please get in touch with our customer service, they will be happy to help!