If you sell rental products or your business revolves around bookings and reservations, you know that managing appointments manually is not a cakewalk.
Getting on calls with clients, finding mutually available meeting slots, sending reminders, and avoiding double bookings – all of it can get taxing.
Moreover, it’s inconvenient for customers as well – in a survey, 59% of respondents expressed frustration with scheduling appointments over the phone. And 70% of them said they’d prefer booking online.
These statistics tell us how important online booking is to run a hassle-free business and make it butter-smooth for the customers too. And one of the easiest ways you can start taking and managing bookings on your website is by using appointment booking plugins.
There are a wide variety of plugins available. But WooCommerce booking plugins remain a top choice for many eCommerce businesses – given their easy setup, valuable integrations, and customization features.
This article will explore eight such WooCommerce plugins that can help you automate and streamline your scheduling process.
Let’s dive in!
1. Yith Booking and Appointment for WooCommerce
From travel agencies to hairdressers and consultants, Yith Booking and Appointment works well for any business wanting to set up a booking system on their website.
Using this plugin, you can create unlimited booking products in your store, define the duration of bookings or give customers the freedom to choose themselves, and even set a limit on the maximum number of bookings you can take for a particular product in a day.
It also lets you create a dynamic pricing system to charge differently for different people or services. You can also choose to review bookings before confirming them – to reduce any chances of errors. And to top it all, the plugin automatically syncs all bookings with your Google calendar.
Top feature: It’s WPML-compatible, meaning you can translate the plugin into any language for convenient setup and use.
Pricing: $199.99/year with 1-year updates and support and a 30-day money-back guarantee.
2. WooCommerce Bookings
WooCommerce Bookings lets your customers schedule appointments, book reservations, or rent equipment on your store hassle-free, without any phone calls.
It offers many features to users – you can define fixed time slots for bookings and even block hours or days off as unbookable. It lets you customize your pricing system – so you can offer discounts for multiple bookings or lower prices for early birds or specific age groups.
What’s even more helpful is that it automatically sends customers confirmation and reminder emails about their bookings. And while it automates managing your bookings, you can still manually add them from the backend when required.
Top feature: It displays your availability in your customer’s timezone, allowing them to book conveniently while ensuring that you won’t have to work outside your hours.
Pricing: $249/year with 1-year extension updates and support and a 30-day money-back guarantee.
3. Bookly Pro
Feature-rich and easy to use, Bookly Pro is an excellent plugin that allows you to automate your scheduling system fully. It lets your customers book appointments online quickly – by simply choosing the service, employee, date, and time slot of their choice.
It also sends them and the service providers SMS and email reminders about the status of bookings. What’s even more interesting is that it lets you manage an unlimited number of staff members – you can connect every employee’s individual calendar and prices to the system, and it’ll handle bookings seamlessly.
Bookly Pro also integrates with add-ons like Deposit Payments, Chain Appointments, and Multiply Appointments to increase its functionality further and improve customer experience.
Top feature: Bookly Pro’s design is fully responsive, so your clients can make bookings conveniently from any device, including mobiles.
Pricing: $89 (one-time payment) with future updates and six-month support.
4. RnB-WooCommerce Booking and Rental
RnB WooCommerce is an excellent plugin for rental businesses, for it allows you to start and manage a rental/booking system on your website with ease.
The plugin lets you create an unlimited number of rental products, and configure general, hourly, daily, or monthly prices for each. You can also set your opening and closing hours and the minimum and maximum number of days you’d like customers to book.
The plugin also enables you to block hours and days on the booking form like holidays to ensure there are no unwanted bookings.
Besides letting you offer discounts (fixed or percentage-based), it provides a host of payment options – online, offline, with a partial or full upfront payment.
Top feature: It offers a “Request for Quote” feature, allowing customers to get in touch with you to negotiate prices.
Pricing: $29 (one-time payment) with future updates and six-month support.
5. Amelia WordPress Appointment Booking
Amelia is an award-winning WordPress booking plugin that helps you automate your booking process and take appointments 24/7.
It lets your customers quickly fix an appointment by choosing their preferred service, employee, date, and time, while you and your employees can easily track all appointments in a calendar view.
Like other plugins, Amelia also sends real-time SMS notifications and reminders to both customers and employees. But what makes it stand out is that it also lets your customers schedule recurring appointments with you. Moreover, it gives you insights into your business’ performance, with information on total appointments, average bookings, and revenue.
Top feature: It integrates with Zoom, so your customers can automatically get meeting links when booking online appointments.
Pricing: Plans start at $59/year (for one domain) with 1-year support and monthly updates.
6. PluginHive – WooCommerce Bookings and Appointments
Whether you sell products, offer services, or both, WooCommerce Bookings and Appointments is an excellent plugin to create a booking system on your website.
Here, the first step is converting your WooCommerce products or services into bookable products. You can then use its various settings to configure the system of your choice – you can provide single-day or multiple-day bookings, set a minimum and maximum booking duration, enable confirmations and even cancellations.
Besides managing different employees’ availability and prices, it also gives you the option to set a buffer or padding time between bookings if required.
Top feature: It lets you customize your booking form and calendar to match your website and branding. You can also add custom fields like a textbox for additional notes from customers.
Pricing: License for a single site costs $99 with 1-year support and updates and a 30-day money-back guarantee.
7. WooCommerce Appointments
WooCommerce Appointments provides all the essential features of a scheduling plugin, but what makes it different is that it’s focused on appointments—and not bookings like rentals.
The plugin lets you set the availability and prices for different days and employees. It also provides a two-way Google calendar sync, meaning it automatically syncs events from your calendar with your website and vice versa. Moreover, staff members can also sync their individual calendars and log in to set their availability as they like.
Woocommerce Appointments gives you considerable flexibility in how you want to create your booking system—you can let appointments get finalized automatically or request confirmation and ask for upfront payments or let customers book for free. It also gives you options to let customers cancel or reschedule appointments to make the experience convenient for them.
Top feature: It offers multi-currency support, so you can easily set prices for appointable products in different currencies.
Pricing: Subscription for one site costs $89 with 1-year support and updates. Renewal is 50% off.
8. Tyche Booking & Appointment Plugin
With Tyche Softwares’ Booking & Appointment plugin, you can create bookings for all types of WooCommerce products in your store – from simple to subscription products.
It lets you set up different types of bookings – like single-day, multiple-day, and recurring, configure different prices for different days, and send automated SMS and email reminders to customers. Plus, it offers integration with Zoom and automatically generates meeting links for all online appointments scheduled on your website.
Its “All Bookings” page gives you a clear view of all your appointments – you can see them in a calendar or list view at your convenience. Meanwhile, customers can view and even reschedule bookings if required through their “My Account” page.
Top feature: If you offer multiple bookable products, customers can easily search for what they want (by dates or category) using its search widget.
Pricing: Offers three plans – Starter ($119/year), Business ($199/year), and Enterprise ($249/year).
Conclusion
By streamlining and automating your scheduling process, appointment booking plugins can save you from losing or repelling customers due to faulty systems. And that’s not it; they can also help you retain your existing customers by providing them a smooth and memorable experience at your store.
While all the eight plugins listed above can help you achieve these benefits, make your pick based on what suits your business needs, budget, workflow, and client requirements. Choose the right tool, and soon enough, you’ll make managing appointments a breeze!