This is precisely where the transformative prowess of WooCommerce booking plugins comes into play, revolutionizing ordinary online stores into dynamic hubs of real-time reservations and appointments.

While WooCommerce doesn’t come with an in-built booking system, the versatility of the WordPress plugin ecosystem makes up for it. WooCommerce booking plugins are the digital bridge that connects businesses and customers seamlessly. They inject a dose of efficiency into the booking process, putting the power of choice firmly into the hands of customers and revolutionizing the way businesses handle appointments, events, and reservations.

In this comprehensive guide, we’ll delve into the essentials of a WooCommerce booking plugin, explore five distinct options, and walk you through the setup of a booking system using our top pick – Bookings for WooCommerce!

Whether you’re a tech-savvy entrepreneur or a business owner taking your first digital steps, this article will serve as your compass in navigating the exciting realm of online bookings on WooCommerce.

Introduction to WooCommerce for booking and rental websites

WooCommerce offers a sturdy, powerful, and versatile foundation for businesses of various sizes and niches, especially those looking to set up a booking or WooCommerce rental website.

Leveraging WooCommerce for your booking or rental business will enable you to effortlessly manage reservations for appointments, events, accommodations, and much more. You’ll be able to define availability, set pricing structures, and even factor in additional costs or discounts.

For example, if you’re running a bicycle rental shop or a photography studio on WooCommerce, you can easily display rental periods, pricing tiers, and availability calendars to your customers. This will result in an intuitive and user-friendly site that simplifies the rental process for both you and your clientele.

Advantages of using a plugin to integrate a booking system on your site

Integrating a booking system on your WooCommerce store can be a game-changer, offering key benefits like:

• Efficiency and time-saving potential: Utilizing a dedicated plugin streamlines the process significantly. This translates into quicker implementation, allowing you to focus on refining other aspects of your business.
• Better user experience: Seamlessly integrating the booking system into your existing WooCommerce website, ensures a consistent user experience for your customers, as they can book rentals directly from your website without being redirected to a third-party platform.
• Plug-and-play simplicity: Integrating booking and rental functionalities becomes as simple as installing a plugin and configuring its settings to match your business model.
• Customizability without complexity: From defining booking time slots to setting up pricing structures, you can wield full control without grappling with technical aspects.
• Updates: By relying on a plugin, you tap into a cycle of continuous improvement without the headache of implementing these upgrades yourself. The plugin developers handle all the technical enhancements of the plugin. All you have to do is update the plugin when a new release comes out or enable automatic updates.
• Support: Most reputable plugins offer customer support, ensuring you have expert assistance whenever you encounter hurdles.
• Cost-efficiency: Plugins present a cost-effective solution compared to using a third-party booking service that may charge additional fees or commissions per booking. A monthly or yearly subscription-based plugin may be more affordable in the long run.
• Data control: When you rely on third-party booking vendors, you may not have full control over the customer data and booking information. With a plugin on your own website, you retain ownership of the data and can use it to improve your marketing and customer service efforts.

By tapping into the power of pre-built solutions, you can focus on what truly matters – growing your business and delivering exceptional customer experiences.

What to look for in a WooCommerce booking plugin?

Regardless of whether you’re running a yoga studio with daily classes, managing a tour company with intricate itineraries, or overseeing a rental service with various items to lease, booking plugins adapt to cater to your unique business requirements.

However, not all plugins are created equal. To ensure you make the right choice, keep the following key aspects in mind:

Availability management

A robust booking plugin should empower you to take control of your booking product’s availability effortlessly. 

This entails setting precise dates or designated periods when your rentals are open for booking. 

Whether you’re dealing with vacation homes, equipment rentals, or event spaces, the ability to define availability is vital.

Real-time availability updates

Double bookings can lead to customer frustration and tarnish your reputation. That’s why a reliable booking plugin should offer real-time availability updates, ensuring that customers can instantly see the current status of your bookable products, preventing overlaps, and garnering trust and satisfaction.

Flexible booking rules

No two businesses are alike, and your booking system should reflect that. Seek a plugin that offers a range of booking rules and options to tailor the experience to your specific needs. 

This encompasses establishing:

• Minimum and maximum booking durations.
• Lead times for reservations.
• Maximum booking capacity.
• Flexibility to set custom pricing structures for diverse seasons or particular days.

Customizable booking forms

A good plugin should offer a high level of customization. You should be able to modify the booking form, calendar layout, and email notifications to align with your brand’s aesthetic.

Look for a plugin that offers customizable booking forms, allowing you to capture pertinent information from customers during the booking process, like preferences regarding the rental and options for additional services. 

Tailoring these forms to suit your business ensures a seamless and personalized experience for your clientele.

Automated confirmations and notifications

Automation is the epitome of time-saving. A top-tier booking plugin should automate the confirmation process, sending out instant confirmation emails to customers once a booking is successfully completed. 

Even better, the ability to set up email notifications for both administrators and customers can be fruitful. These notifications can include booking reminders, cancellations, or modifications, keeping all parties informed and engaged.

Booking calendar

Visual aids can significantly simplify complex information. A visual booking calendar is an invaluable tool for customers and administrators alike. It provides a clear overview of rental product availability, making it easier for customers to find suitable booking slots and for administrators to manage their inventory efficiently.

Seasonal pricing and discounts

Flexibility in pricing is essential, especially if your rental rates fluctuate with the changing seasons or specific dates. 

A rich booking plugin should accommodate seasonal pricing structures seamlessly and should provide the ability to offer discounts and promotions during specific periods. This can not only attract customers but also incentivize bookings.

Features and functionality

A top-tier booking tool should offer an array of essential functions, including:

• Multiple booking types to cater to various rental scenarios. 
• Automatic reminders to enhance the user experience by sending timely notifications to customers, minimizing no-shows, and providing a seamless booking journey. 
• Integrated payment gateways to streamline transactions.
• Reporting capabilities to gain valuable insights into your business’s performance.

Pricing structure

Different plugins may come with diverse pricing models. Discern whether the plugin is offered as a subscription-based service or a freemium model with optional add-ons. 

Also, explore any potential hidden costs, such as fees for additional features or customer support. Having a clear understanding of the pricing structure ensures that your chosen plugin aligns with your budget and long-term business goals.

User reviews and ratings

User reviews and ratings provide genuine insights into the plugin’s quality, reliability, and overall user satisfaction. Positive reviews highlight the strengths and advantages of the tool, while any concerns raised can offer you a well-rounded perspective on potential limitations or challenges. 

Taking the time to explore user feedback can guide you toward a plugin that resonates with your business needs and delivers on its promises.

Investing time in plugin research and considering the above tips now can save you headaches and hassle down the line, guaranteeing that you pick a plugin that suits your business needs the most.

Top 5 WooCommerce booking plugins

1. Bookings for WooCommerce

Bookings for WooCommerce

Accept bookings and rentals for your WooCommerce products

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Bookings for WooCommerce is your ultimate solution for seamless booking management. This dynamic booking plugin caters to a diverse array of businesses specializing in bookings, rentals, and accommodations.

What sets this plugin apart is its comprehensive suite of features that provides:

• Unparalleled flexibility in configuring your booking units, whether it’s based on days, nights, or weeks. 
• The ability to add booking forms to product pages, enabling customers to specify quantities and other booking or rental information.
• Complete control to define booking durations according to your business needs by setting minimum and maximum booking lengths effortlessly, ensuring optimal utilization of your resources.
• Easy conditional discount setting (e.g., book for a whole week and get a 30% discount).
• The option to set buffer time between bookings and even set postponed starts to enable businesses like hotels or apartments to meticulously prepare before guests arrive.
• Availability management and automatic calendar updates to prevent duplicate bookings or bookings during blocked-out periods.
• Automatic booking confirmation via email.
• Seamless integration with third-party services that employ the iCal format, syncing with platforms like Airbnb, Booking.com, or VRBO.

Seamlessly integrated into your online store, Bookings for WooCommerce offers two pricing plans: one for a single site and the other for an unlimited number of sites.

Even better, the 14-day money-back guarantee makes purchasing this tool totally risk-free. This will enable you to assess the plugin within your unique setup, encompassing your specific theme and assortment of plugins so you can confidently confirm that the plugin aligns with your requirements.

2. WooCommerce Bookings by WooCommerce

The WooCommerce Bookings plugin is a prominent contender in the booking domain. This official WooCommerce plugin offers a myriad of features for managing appointments and resources by:

• Enabling businesses to set fixed time slots and define time slots in days, hours, or even minutes.
• Customizing pricing for groups, individuals, specific days, or special occasions.
• Displaying availability in the customer’s time zone.
• Sending reminder emails to reduce no-shows and confirm bookings.
• Managing the calendar view, updating bookings, and syncing with Google Calendar.

WooCommerce Bookings is via a subscription-based pricing plan; however, you may need to purchase additional add-ons to meet your specific business requirements. 

Also, its complexity might pose a challenge for beginners because of its slightly steep learning curve, requiring a period of acclimatization to master its functionalities.

3. WooCommerce Bookings And Appointments by Plugin Hive

Bookings and Appointments can be a good match for businesses that need recurring bookings. It presents an array of tools to craft a booking system tailored to your business requisites, like:

• Offering booking durations in minutes, hours, days, or months, and allowing multi-day and multi-appointment bookings.
• Enabling various pricing rules such as special prices based on days selected, people, specific days, weekdays, months/seasons, and even different prices for staff.
• Providing extensive control over booking availability by setting time limits, booking window periods, and restricting bookings to specific days or weekdays.
• Attaching extra resources like parking, extra beds, etc., with bookings, enabling automatic or customer-driven resource assignment.
• Facilitating effective communication through email notifications to users and admin for new bookings, confirmations, and cancellations.

This plugin offers a free version, which offers limited functionality. Alternatively, you can choose from three licensing types to get all the benefits of this plugin.

4. Bookings for WooCommerce by WP Swings

Bookings for WooCommerce provides a serviceable set of features – albeit more restricted in comparison to its peers: 

• Enables turning products into time-limited booking options.
• Allows setting maximum daily bookings.
• Gives the user the option between displaying unavailable or available booking dates.

While adept at handling straightforward booking needs, this plugin may come up short when faced with more intricate scheduling demands.

This plugin has a free version and three premium versions, starting at $79/year pricing plans, including 24/7 customer care service.

5. WordPress/WooCommerce Bookings & Rentals by SalesIgniter

This plugin goes the extra mile by offering additional inventory management features, catering to a broader array of businesses. Its key features include:

• Enabling customers to select their start and end date, or just start date with rental length.
• Quantity-based or serial number-based tracking for rental products.
• Manual inventory reservation for special events or offline orders.
• Option to allow overbooking or not.

This plugin might be ideal for you if you’re dealing with supply chain and inventory management, and it comes in two payment options.

How to set up a booking system with Bookings for WooCommerce

Our top choice, Bookings for WooCommerce, makes setting up bookings and rentals on your site a breeze – here’s how: 

1. Purchase the plugin from the Plugin Republic website and download it to your computer.
2. From your WordPress dashboard, navigate to Plugins > Add Plugin > Upload Plugin, then install and activate the plugin.

3. Go to your products list, find the unit that you want to add booking functionality to, and click edit.

4. Scroll down to the Product data section and select Booking from the drop-down menu.

5. Fill in the details of your booking interface according to your business needs. For this tutorial, we are setting a per-night booking that has a minimum booking period of five nights and a maximum booking period of 28 nights. We are also setting the standard cost per night to £60, and we are not going to allow bookings after the 30th of September.

This will be the result in the frontend:

6. Set non-standard booking costs if your business requires such an option, by going to the Custom Pricing tab. For this example, we are going to mark down the price per night to £40 starting the 23rd of September till the end of the bookable period we defined in the previous step. You can also add a discount rule in the Discounts tab.

The result will look like this:

That’s it – that’s how easy it is to set up bookings and rentals on your WooCommerce store using the Bookings for WooCommerce plugin! 

Get started with Bookings for WooCommerce

WooCommerce booking plugins are advantageous for businesses offering booking and renting services. With the right plugin, you can streamline your operations, offer a seamless booking process to your customers, and ultimately, boost your revenue. 

Among the myriad of options available, Bookings for WooCommerce stands head and shoulders above the rest. It offers a plethora of features, including flexible booking rules, real-time availability updates, customizable booking forms, automated confirmations and notifications, and much more. Furthermore, it’s easy to set up and manage, making it an excellent tool for managing bookings and rentals with utmost efficiency.

Bookings for WooCommerce

Accept bookings and rentals for your WooCommerce products

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Why wait? It’s time to take your business to the next level. Enhance your booking process, increase your efficiency, and provide a top-notch user experience by using Bookings for WooCommerce today!

The post The ultimate guide to WooCommerce booking plugins appeared first on Plugin Republic.

Version 2.0 is due to be released by the end of May.

Bookings for WooCommerce

Accept bookings and rentals for your WooCommerce products

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New feature: Sync your WooCommerce bookings with external services

You can now sync between Airbnb, Booking.com, VRBO, and other third party booking sites which use the ical calendar format. You can even sync between two or more WooCommerce sites.

This is essential for anyone who is taking bookings for their property on multiple sites. So if you have an Airbnb listing and your own WooCommerce site, you can now massively reduce the risk of double booking.

Syncing is two-way – meaning that when a user makes a reservation on an external site like Airbnb, your WooCommerce site will update availability and if a user makes a reservation on your WooCommerce site, your Airbnb site will also update its availability.

Remember that most external sites like Airbnb only sync at certain intervals, e.g. every two hours, so you may wish to manually sync if you see an order go through on your WooCommerce site. Please see the guidance for the external site in question for full details of how to do this. You’ll find guidance for particular sites below.

On your WooCommerce site, you can also manually sync calendars, either for a specific product or for all bookable products. You can also specify how often you would like your site to automatically sync, e.g. every 30 minutes.

How to set up calendar syncs

Go to Bookings > External. Enable the ‘Auto-sync calendars’ option and enter a value in the ‘Sync interval’ field. This value is the number of minutes between each sync. The minimum value is 30. Note that if you have a high number of calendars to sync, there’s a potential performance issue on your site if you sync too often.

Next, go to the Product that you wish to sync. On the Booking tab in the Product data section click the menu item for ‘External calendars’.

Check the ‘Enable sync calendars’ option.

In the table, enter the name of your external service, e.g. Airbnb, and the calendar URL from that site. There’s guidance on how to obtain this URL below. You can sync up to four calendars with external services.

Save your product.

You can now copy the URL in the ‘Export URL’ field and enter that into the correct place in your external site’s settings – guidance below.

How to get your calendar URL from an external site

You can use the links below to find out how to get a calendar URL from each external site.

• Syncing your Airbnb calendar with other calendars
• Syncing your Booking.com calendar with other calendars
• Importing a calendar to sync with VRBO reservation calendars

Your bookings will now be synced between your WooCommerce site and your external sites. Remember that syncing is not necessarily immediate – external services will only sync at the defined interval.

New feature: Improved back-end editing of bookings

You can now manually add bookings from the back-end of your site and edit existing bookings. Note: this replaces the ability to edit booking details from the order screen.

To edit an existing booking, go to Bookings in your WordPress admin. Click on the booking you wish to edit and click the ‘Edit booking’ button.

You’ll be able to enter a new start date, then a new end date, and enter a quantity if enabled for the product. Click ‘Update’ and your booking will be updated.

Manually create a new booking

In version 2.0 it’s now possible to create a new booking from the back-end. Go to Bookings > Add Booking and enter the booking details, including the product, start date, end date and quantity. You can also enter the user details and, once the booking has been published, you can then link it to a new order.

New feature: Front-end search

Your users can now search for bookable products using start and end dates. So if you have multiple products, users can find which ones are available between certain dates.

To enable front-end search, go to WooCommerce > Settings > Bookings > Search and check the ‘Enable search on archive pages’ field.

This will automatically insert a search form at the top of your shop and archive pages. Users will be able to enter the start and end dates they’d like to book, and they’ll see all your products with availability within those dates.

New feature: Back-end calendar

It’s now possible to view a single calendar that shows availability for all your bookable products in one place. Each day shows overall availability: just click on individual dates to see what bookings you have for that day and availability information for each bookable product.

To view the back-end calendar, go to Bookings > Calendar.

New feature: Automatic emails

Bookings for WooCommerce allows you to send customisable emails. You can choose to enable one or more of the following emails:

• Before a booking starts
• After a booking starts
• Before a booking ends
• After a booking ends

So, for example, if you want to send a welcome email a couple of days before a user’s booking starts, you can enable the ‘Before Booking Starts’ email and enter 2 in the ‘Days’ field. Your email will be automatically sent two days before the start of the booking.

You can enter content for the email. If you wish to dynamically include the booking ID or the start date, you can use the following tags: {booking_id} and {date}. This will be automatically replaced with the correct data in the email itself.

To enable emails, go to WooCommerce > Settings > Emails. You’ll see the four emails at the bottom of the list. Just click into each one to enable and edit it.

What else is new?

The new version of the plugin also includes the following enhancements and new features:

• A new Bookings menu item allowing you to see all bookings on your site
• Bookings are now filterable in the back-end by user and product
• A new cart-expiry setting to ensure products don’t get held in users’ carts
• Improved navigation in Product data > Bookings

If you have any questions about the plugin, just post them in the comments below and we’ll get straight back to you.

Bookings for WooCommerce

Accept bookings and rentals for your WooCommerce products

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The post Bookings for WooCommerce 2.0 – new and improved features appeared first on Plugin Republic.

WooCommerce is a powerful eCommerce platform. However, it doesn’t have the in-built functionality you need to create tour booking pages. To do this, you’ll need to use WooCommerce plugins that integrate seamlessly with your WordPress site and give you the exact set of features you’re looking for.

In this article, we’ll recommend our top picks for the best plugins for WooCommerce to help you create the ultimate tour booking page. We’ll explain how to use each plugin included in this article, step by step.

What features do you need on a tour booking page?

Different tour booking systems and travel agencies have different sets of requirements. Mostly, it depends on what kind of tour you’re running. For example, if you sell expedition tours as part of a vacation package, your needs will be somewhat different from someone who sells museum tours to schools.

Let’s take a look at some essential features for any tour booking page and some bonus features that could be beneficial to your specific business:

• Booking calendar. A booking calendar lets customers select the day, time, and period of their tour. They should also be able to specify how many people are in their tour party or group.
  
  There are scenarios where you may need to set up multiple booking calendars, such as if you offer different tours. And, if you offer accommodation, rental equipment, or other activities as part of your services and you want to keep these separate from the tour itself, you’ll also need to create them as separate bookable products with their own booking calendars.
• Add-ons. You might want to include product add-ons to include in the tour options. For example, you might want to let customers select if they want lunch as an extra option in their tour.
• Flexible payment options. It’s important to set up easy payment gateways so customers can select their tour and checkout seamlessly. Depending on the type of tour you run, you might want to allow customers to pay a deposit first and then the remaining amount at a later date.
• Discounts. To maximize your tour sales, you may want to set up discounts that are automatically offered when customers select certain options. For example, if a customer books a minimum number of people for the tour, you might want to offer them a 5% discount.
• Easy backend management. The tour booking system you set up should be easy to manage from the WordPress backend. You should be able to see exactly how many people are booked for a specific tour and what their specific requirements and add-ons are.
• Online gift shop. If your business has the right branding, you can also set up an online gift shop on your WordPress site where people can buy souvenirs, either before or after the tour.
• Thank you page. A thank you page on your WordPress site is perfect for sharing specific tour information with customers after they have checked out and made their booking.

What plugins do you need to set up a tour booking page on WooCommerce?

Now that we’ve discussed some of the most essential features a tour booking page needs, let’s look at the best plugins to set up those features in WooCommerce.

Some of the plugins in our list are essential for a tour booking page, while others are nice to have but may not be necessary to your business. We’re including them anyway so you can see what you think would be useful to you, and allocate your budget accordingly.

Bookings for WooCommerce

Bookings for WooCommerce

Accept bookings and rentals for your WooCommerce products

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The Bookings for WooCommerce plugin is essential for your tour booking page as it lets you set up booking calendars for your tours.

You can choose to create a single booking calendar or set up multiple booking calendars, depending on the types of tours you run. For example, if you have different tour options, you can let customers book as many tours as they want at once.

Bookings for WooCommerce gives you plenty of options to set up booking dates in WooCommerce:

• Booking units are set as days, nights, or weeks.
• Block out dates from being booked and set start dates. This feature is particularly useful if you only offer tours on specific days of the week.
• Add a buffer period between bookings and a notice period before the booking can start. This ensures your tour doesn’t get overbooked.
• Decide how far in advance to take online bookings.

This WooCommerce tour booking plugin also lets you set up different prices for different periods of the year. If your tour is more popular in the summer, you can set up the plugin to charge premium prices automatically.

The Bookings for WooCommerce plugin lets you set up discount offers that are triggered automatically when customers select certain options. For example, if customers book at least 5 people for the tour, they get a 10% discount.

If you have a set number of places on a tour, you can track the number of available places directly from the backend to ensure the tour doesn’t get overbooked.

When customers select a tour, it goes to their cart and they can check out directly as they would for any other WooCommerce product.

WooCommerce Product Add-Ons Ultimate

WooCommerce Product Add-Ons Ultimate

Personalise products with extra fields and custom options

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If you can afford another premium plugin to enhance your WooCommerce tour booking page, we recommend going to WooCommere Product Add-Ons Ultimate. This plugin lets you customize product pages and it integrates seamlessly with Bookings for WooCommerce.

With the WooCommerce Product Add-Ons Ultimate plugin, you can include extra travel booking options for customers to select from. For example, if you operate a skiing tour, customers can select the size of the rented equipment needed for each member of the party.

You can use this plugin to create product add-ons and insert them as extra fields to complement your booking calendars. There are 16 field types to choose from including dropdowns, checkboxes, and image swatches.

The plugin lets you add a textbox to describe each product add-on. This is a great way to let customers know about each option and help them decide what they need.

Finally, you can assign prices to each product add-on field if you want to charge extra money for it. For example, you might want to give customers the option to include a packed lunch in their tour or have a dedicated tour operator accompany them. The plugin also lets you set up discounts for customers who select many tour extras.

WooCommerce Deposits and Part Payments

WooCommerce Deposits and Part Payments

Provide flexible payment options on products and orders

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Using the WooCommerce Deposits and Part Payments plugin, you can let customers pay a deposit for their tour. This is a great way to encourage more people to book your tour as they won’t need to make the full payment right away.

You can set the deposit payment either as a percentage or as a set price:

• Percentage – For e.g., customers first make an online payment of 20% of the tour price
• Set price – For e.g., the tour costs $200 and the initial payment is $75

The plugin lets you set your payment options so customers can choose whether they’d like to pay the full amount right away or pay a deposit instead. You can also disable the option for customers to pay in full if you’d like.

The WooCommerce Deposits and Part Payments plugin lets you set discounts for customers who choose to pay the full amount from the start. This is an easy way to encourage customers to pay in full. The final payment order will automatically be scheduled when the deposit is paid.

WooCommerce Thank You Pages

WooCommerce Thank You Pages

Start marketing to users the instant they check out

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Although this isn’t an essential plugin to set up your WooCommerce tour booking page, it offers a great way to make your customers feel good about their booking.

Tours involve human interaction and sending customers to a personalised thank you page on your WordPress site can establish a rapport with your customers before the tour begins.

You can use the WooCommerce Thank You Pages plugin to create a thank you page that outlines some important information about the tour. This may include the time the tour will start and what customers should bring with them. If you don’t offer accommodation as part of the tour package, you can use this space to provide a list of nearby hotel booking options.

If you offer different tours that customers may be interested in, you could use your thank you page to offer customers a discount code for the next tour they book with you.

How to create a tour booking page with these WooCommerce plugins

Here, we’ll show you step-by-step how to set up a tour booking page in WordPress using the plugins we mentioned above.

Step #1: Get the WooCommerce tour booking plugins

To get started, get the plugins you need to set up your tour booking page in WordPress. At the minimum, we recommend getting the Bookings for WooCommerce plugin that lets you set up booking calendars in WooCommerce.

Bookings for WooCommerce

Accept bookings and rentals for your WooCommerce products

Find Out More

If you’d like to offer extra options, you can also get the WooCommerce Product Add-Ons Ultimate plugin that integrates seamlessly with Bookings for WooCommerce.

Depending on the type of tour you run, you might want to give customers the option to pay a deposit for the tour instead of making the full payment right away. For this, we recommend getting the WooCommerce Deposits and Part Payments plugin.

And, if you want to set up a thank you page to make customers feel good about their upcoming tour and share important information, get the WooCommerce Thank You Page plugin.

Once you’ve decided on which plugins to get, purchase them and install them on your WordPress website. Next, activate the plugins and enter their license keys to start using them.

Step #2: Set up tours as WooCommerce booking products

Now that you have the plugins, you can start setting up tours as booking products in WooCommerce and display them on your tour page. Here’s what you need to do:

1. Go to ‘Products’ > ‘Add New’ to create a new tour product.
2. Enter a title, content, and images as you wish.
3. In the ‘Product data’ section, select ‘Booking’ using the dropdown.
4. Set the parameters for the tour product:
   1. Booking unit – This determines the length of the booking. You can choose from day, night, or week.
   2. Bookings start – Specify a day of the week when a booking must start.
   3. Min booking length – Specify a minimum period for the tour.
   4. Max booking length – Specify a maximum period for the tour.
   5. Postpone start – Prevent bookings from starting immediately.
   6. Buffer period – Block off time at the end of a booking period.
   7. Standard cost – Set the base cost of the tour.
   8. Last bookable date – Set how far ahead customers can make bookings.

1. Set non-standard costs as necessary. You can use this option to block out specific date ranges, or set peak or reduced prices for tours.
2. Optionally, you can set discount rules by specifying the minimum duration required to qualify for the discount offer and applying it to the entire booking period or a partial period.

At this stage, your WooCommerce booking tour page should look something like this:

Step #3: Create product add-ons to a tour booking

If you get the WooCommerce Product Add-Ons Ultimate plugin, you can create product add-ons to give customers even more options to choose from.

For example, you can give customers the option to opt-in for a lunch box at an additional $7.50 per person by creating a checkbox. Here’s how:

1. From the ‘Product data’ section, click on the ‘Product Add-Ons’ tab.
2. Click on the ‘Add Group’ button and enter a title and group description.
3. Click on the ‘Add Field’ button and select ‘Checkbox’ from the ‘Field Type’ dropdown.
4. Set a ‘Field Label’ and ‘Field Price’.
5. Tick the ‘Price per booking unit?’ checkbox.
6. Optionally, add a field image and description.

Step #4: Create a relevant thank you page

With the WooCommerce Thank You Pages plugin, you can create a relevant thank you page for customers in a few simple steps. Here’s what you need to do:

1. Navigate to ‘WooCommerce’ > ‘Thank You Pages’ and click ‘Add Thank You Page’.
2. Give the thank you page a suitable title.
3. In the content area, add the [[order_custom_content]] shortcode and enter the custom content. This can be a simple thank you message along with some information on the next steps.
4. Close the custom content area using the [[/order_custom_content]] shortcode.

You can also use this space to:

• Recommend other tours to customers using the [[order_cross_sells]] shortcode.
• Add downloadables (e.g. a map) using the [[order_download]] shortcode.
• Show social share buttons using the [[order_social_shares]] shortcode.
• Offer discounts using the [[order_coupon]] shortcode.

Preview

Your WooCommerce tour booking page should look something like this on the front end:

Create the ultimate tour booking page in WooCommerce

If you work with a tour agency and want to make the booking process engaging and straightforward for your customers, you’ll want to set up a really good tour booking page in WooCommerce. However, you’ll need plugins to do this.

We’ve recommended four plugins that you can use to set up a really solid tour booking site. The plugin that’s absolutely necessary for this is Bookings for WooCommerce.

If you need to offer more options as add-ons, WooCommerce Product Add-Ons Ultimate is a game-changer. You can boost more sales by letting customers pay a deposit for their tour, and to do that you’ll need WooCommerce Deposits and Parts Payments. And, if you have the budget for one more plugin, WooCommerce Thank You Pages is a great way to connect with your customers ahead of their tour.

Bookings for WooCommerce

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Get started with Bookings for WooCommerce today (all purchases are covered by a 14-day money-back guarantee!).

The post How to set up a WooCommerce tour booking page using plugins (2023 guide) appeared first on Plugin Republic.

If you have a business that relies on customers booking your properties, venues, or rental products, it’s really important to have a solid online booking system. More and more customers want to make bookings online at their own convenience, and your business needs to adapt to increase sales and improve customer satisfaction.

If you want to let customers make rental bookings on your WordPress site, using a plugin is the best way to do it. In this article, we’ll take a look at the top 7 WordPress plugins for rental bookings.

Why use a WordPress rental booking plugin?

If you use a plugin to set up an online booking system directly on your WordPress site, users can select a booking date for rental products and pay you directly from the site.

By setting up a booking calendar on your site, you are also less reliant on third-party sites that charge you a fee whenever someone books your products. For instance, if you rent hotels on a third-party site such as Booking.com, you will be charged a commission every time a booking is made for your property.

On the other hand, plugin licences usually have an annual fee that is more reasonable in the long run for your business. In addition to this, some plugins also offer a lifetime licence option in the form of a single payment.

Having an online booking system in your WordPress site’s backend also makes it much easier to keep track of available inventory, your customers, your booked dates, and everything else you need to successfully run your rental booking business.

Additionally, if your business offers various services, properties, or products as rental booking products, you can embed multiple booking calendars on your site. This way, depending on your rental booking business and the products you want to rent out, you can adjust the booking settings according to your unique requirements.

For instance, if you rent out hotel rooms and boats, you can let guests book a boat for a one-day minimum while hotel rooms can only be booked for a 2 nights minimum slot.

What to look for in a WordPress rental booking plugin

You need to consider your specific business needs when it comes to accepting online bookings. That’s why it’s important to have a plugin that offers you lots of flexibility for you to set up online bookings on your WordPress site exactly as you need to.

Ideally, you want to choose a plugin that offers extensive rental booking features, such as the ability to add a booking calendar to your site so customers can select the dates they want to book, the option to view and manage all bookings using the default WordPress admin panel, and the ability to embed a booking calendar anywhere on your site without needing any prior coding knowledge.

A good plugin is easy to set up and offers you full control over how bookings can be used on your WordPress site. You want to have the ability to set minimum and maximum booking lengths, block out specific booking dates and automatically calculate the booking cost while also letting customers book products individually or in multiples.

Additionally, you want to offer your customers an easy way to manage, view, and cancel bookings whenever they need to. This helps enhance the customer experience on your rental bookings site and increases customer satisfaction.

Top 7 rental booking plugins for WordPress

Let’s dive deeper into the best rental booking plugins for WordPress. It’s important to note that some of the plugins we list will work just fine on standard WordPress sites, but others have to be integrated with a WooCommerce site.

If you are an online business that runs on a WordPress site, it makes sense to set up WooCommerce anyway. It’s one of the most popular eCommerce solutions for WordPress sites, its core features are free to use, and it will run just about anywhere you can get WordPress hosting.

You can easily set up rental bookings on WooCommerce using most of the plugins we mention below. In addition to this, since WooCommerce comes with multiple payment gateway options, accepting your customer’s booking payments is simple and straightforward.

#1. Bookings for WooCommerce

Bookings for WooCommerce is the top plugin on our list, and it works great for all kinds of rental bookings such as properties, venues, and other rental products like cars or drones.

Bookings for WooCommerce

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Bookings for WooCommerce integrates seamlessly with WooCommerce and offers you full control over every aspect of your booking product. This means you can set booking units by day, night, or by week, set minimum and maximum booking lengths, and allocate the product quantity to be booked singly or in multiples. For instance, you can let customers rent a hotel room for 2 nights or let them book a venue for a minimum of 3 days.

Using the Bookings for WooCommerce plugin, you can also set restrictions for the booking periods and create a unique user experience on your site. For starters, you can set booking start days so customers can only start their booking period after a specific day.

For example, you can set it up so that all bookings start on Mondays only. Similarly, you can also set a booking buffer period, so there’s enough time for you to arrange logistics between booking days. For instance, you can make sure that bookings can only be made two days after the previous booking ends.

In addition to this, Bookings for WooCommerce also lets you set postponed starts to your booking products. This way, users can make bookings in advance, giving your business more time to make arrangements and deliver the booking product to your customer quickly. This is particularly great for products that have to be prepared such as custom swag bags, cakes, or bouquets.

Bookings for WooCommerce also comes with a lot of flexible pricing features. One example of this is seasonal pricing, meaning you can charge higher or lower prices for specific periods in the year. It also lets you set a discount based on the total number of days a customer makes the booking. For example, you can offer a 10% discount if users book a gallery venue for four days instead of three.

Using the Bookings for WooCommerce plugin, bookings are added directly to the customers’ carts, and they can check out to confirm the booking. This makes booking an incredibly easy process for customers. Once the customer has made the booking, they will receive an email notification containing all the booking details.

Bookings for WooCommerce plugin integrates perfectly with WooCommerce Product Add-Ons Ultimate – a plugin that lets you add extra, fully customisable options to your bookings products. This way, you can create booking products and showcase additional product options on your WooCommerce site. For instance, if you rent hotel rooms, you can let customers select breakfast or laundry options as add-ons.

The basic version of Bookings for WooCommerce can be used on one site, but you can also upgrade to the pro version and use the plugin on unlimited sites!

#2. WooCommerce Bookings

WooCommerce Bookings is a simple plugin that’s designed to let you create bookable products on your WooCommerce site.

This is a very popular choice for WooCommerce businesses, as this is the official rental booking plugin made by the developers over at WooCommerce. The plugin makes it very easy to create booking products and be very specific about the time slots you set. This way, whether you want to offer online class bookings with fixed time slots, or offer hotel bookings and let customers select from a range of dates, the plugin is a solid option.

Additionally, you can also set the minimum and the maximum number of participants and customise the pricing of your booking product accordingly. This way, you can charge extra if customers want to bring extra participants to the venue. The plugin even lets you set up confirmations, reminders, and free cancellations for customers who have already made their bookings on your site.

However, this plugin lacks the functionality to set up buffers between bookings or block out double bookings, which are booking options that you get in many of the plugins in our list. Compared to Bookings for WooCommerce, this plugin is more expensive.

#3. Rentle

Rentle is a free-to-use WordPress bookings plugin that lets you create advanced booking products on your site.

For starters, you can set up a booking calendar with real-time inventory management. This gives you a better idea of which dates your products are already booked and makes it easy for you to manage all booking requests from your site.

The Pro plan comes with additional features such as multi-location support and multi-language options. You can also package products better which is a great way to sell booking bundles and increase the average order value on your WordPress site.

Rentle works seamlessly with default WordPress, but it’s worth noting that you get many of the same features it offers by default in WooCommerce, without needing the plugin. For instance, Rentle integrates with payment methods directly such as Google Pay, Apple Pay, credit cards, and other local payment methods. However, WooCommerce does this as well, so as a store owner this wouldn’t be a particularly noteworthy feature for you.

Rentle offers a Lite and Core version with varying pricing plans depending on how many features you need. It’s also important to note that the most advanced plan is quite expensive, especially if you’re comparing it with a feature-rich plugin such as the Bookings for WooCommerce plugin.

#4. RnB – WooCommerce Booking & Rental Plugin

RnB – WooCommerce Booking & Rental Plugin integrates with your WooCommerce site.

Using the plugin, you can add unlimited rental products to your WooCommerce site and easily keep track of them using a maintenance and blocking calendar. In addition to this, you can also add a “Request for Quote” button to your bookable products. This way, customers can negotiate pricing. You can set custom pricing for these customers so that they’re more likely to check out from your site.

Other notable features include hourly range pricing, easy inventory management and variations, unlimited payable resources, and persons.

#5. Booqable

Booqable is a professional WordPress bookings plugin that makes it easy to create bookable products and accept user bookings.

Other than creating professional-looking bookable products on your WordPress site, the plugin also lets you easily keep track of products you rent using a solid inventory management system. You can also set tiered pricing structures and advanced pricing for bookings, so it’s easier to charge customers a fair rental price according to your unique bookable products.

In addition to this, Booqable also integrates with major payment gateways like PayPal and Stripe. This way you can let customers easily pay using popular payment methods when making online bookings from your WordPress website. As we’ve discussed, this feature is only handy if you don’t have a WooCommerce store.

#6. Lodgify

Lodgify is a bookings plugin designed for property rental businesses that want to offer their customers an easy way to make bookings online.

Using the plugin, you can turn your ordinary WordPress site into a multi-property booking portal. You can showcase a search box, let users view search results with a map view, and create a dedicated page for listing each of your properties.

Additionally, if you also promote your properties on external listing websites such as Airbnb and Booking.com, Lodgify also lets you synchronise multiple calendars and booking data.

#7. Booking and Appointment Plugin for WooCommerce

Booking and Appointment Plugin for WooCommerce offers an all-in-one solution for offering your customers an easy way to make reservations and bookings online from your site.

You can integrate the plugin on your WooCommerce site and set it up for your property rentals, product rentals, and appointments. The plugin lets you create bookings with simple, variable, grouped, bundle, composite, and subscription products on your WooCommerce site.

Customers on the front end can search for booking availability by the dates they want to make bookings. Even if a customer makes a mistake when selecting dates from the single product page, they can update the booking directly from the cart and checkout page.

The best WordPress plugin for rental bookings and appointments

The plugins we listed above, though similar, may have specific features that make sense for your business. However, in most cases, we recommend our top option: Bookings for WooCommerce.

The plugin is very versatile and ideal for all kinds of property rentals, venue rentals such as galleries or events halls, or product rentals such as drones, cars, or boats. It comes with a multitude of settings for creating bookings according to your bookable products and business model.

It’s important to note that you can’t set up hourly bookings using this plugin. Bookings for WooCommerce only lets you offer property, venue or a product to be booked for at least one day or night.

Beyond that, the flexibility you have is vast, making it the best option for most businesses. The plugin is extremely simple to set up, so you don’t need to be tech-savvy to get started.

Once you get the Bookings for WooCommerce plugin, install and activate it on your WooCommerce site. Create a new rental product by navigating to Products → Add New.

Set basic product details and select Booking using the Product Data dropdown menu. Here, you can set all your booking details including Booking unit, Max bookings per unit, Standard cost, Buffer period, as well as the Max booking length and Min booking length.

Once you’re done specifying basic details, you can start specifying un-bookable dates or charge higher rates for specific dates using the Add Date Range button. You can set the Cost per Unit field to a higher or lower price depending on the period of time. You can even offer a discount if customers book the product for more than a specified amount of days.

Once you’re ready, click on the Publish button to continue.

Customers can now select their Check in and Check Out dates directly using your WooCommerce site.

They will be shown the pricing according to their selections so they can add the product to their cart and checkout.

Ready to set up online bookings on your site?

Having an online booking system on your WordPress site is a great way to automate bookings for your business. This also reduces your reliance on third-party booking sites while helping you generate more revenue. As a result, it can also help your business grow and maximise sales in the long run.

While there are many options for booking plugins that let you create bookable products, Bookings for WooCommerce is the best plugin available for all types of rental booking businesses. The plugin is very easy to set up, even if you’re not very tech-savvy, and offers lots of flexibility to set up bookings for your properties, venues, or products.

Bookings for WooCommerce

Accept bookings and rentals for your WooCommerce products

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Ready to start offering online bookings on your site? Get Bookings for WooCommerce today!

The post Get started with the 7 best WordPress booking plugins in 2022 appeared first on Plugin Republic.

It’s an official WooCommerce extension with over 10,000 active installations, making it one of the most popular booking plugins across the WordPress and WooCommerce ecosystem. However, there are many WooCommerce Bookings alternatives that might be better suited for your business.

In this article, we’re going to look at 7 plugins for online bookings and explain why you might want to consider them instead of WooCommerce Bookings.

How to choose an alternative to WooCommerce Bookings

How do you decide which WooComerce Bookings alternative is the right choice for your business? Check out this list of criteria that you can keep in mind when reading about the 7 plugins in this article.

• Price: How much do you want to pay for a plugin? At $249 a year, WooCommerce Bookings is on the higher end of booking plugins. You might want a plugin that is more affordable or one that offers a wider range of features at the pricepoint.
  
• Features: You’ll want to make sure to choose a plugin that has the right features to support your specific business needs. Do you own a hotel with various types of rooms and packages? If so, you’ll want to set up and customise multiple booking calendars. Do you want to offer discounts to customers if they select certain options? If so, you’ll want a booking plugin that allows conditional pricing.
  
• Booking Management: You’ll want a plugin that lets you manage your bookings easily. For example, if you’re hosting an event, you’ll want to automatically know the exact number of people who have booked their place, and how many of them have paid.
  
• Theme compatibility: WooCommerce Bookings is not compatible with every WordPress theme, which could be a reason to look for an alternative. Choosing a plugin that integrates with any theme gives you more flexibility to update your site’s design down the line.

The top 7+ WooCommerce Booking alternatives

Before we start going over our list of the top 7 WooCommerce Booking alternatives, it’s worth mentioning that another reason you may be considering an alternative booking system is that you don’t have a WooCommerce site, and want a plugin that’s just compatible with WordPress.

A few of the plugins on our list will run on WordPress alone, but we do recommend that you install WooCommerce. It’s free to set up and gives you much more flexibility as a business owner in the long run.

1. Bookings for WooCommerce

Bookings for WooCommerce

Accept bookings and rentals for your WooCommerce products

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Bookings for WooCommerce offers a professional solution for creating bookings on your WooCommerce site.

It’s the best booking plugin designed for WooCommerce and is ideal for setting up all kinds of product rentals, including property rental bookings, holiday lettings, venue rentals, vehicle rentals, and equipment rentals. The plugin is easy to set up and configure.

You can create a seamless shopping experience on your WooCommerce site with Bookings for WooCommerce. The plugin lets customers select their “Check-in” and “Check-out” dates directly from the single product page. This way, when users are done selecting their booking details, the product can be added to their shopping cart just like any other WooCommerce product. Once customers check out from your WooCommerce site, they will receive an email notification containing their booking details.

Check out this tutorial on how to accept hotel and accommodation bookings with WooCommerce if you want to see a practical example of how easy it is to set up Bookings for WooCommerce and benefit from its features.

The Bookings for WooCommerce plugin gives you lots of flexibility to set up bookable products on your WooCommerce site. You can set the booking unit as days, nights, or weeks, set maximum and minimum booking lengths, block out specific booking dates, and add buffer periods between bookings. This gives you full control over setting up WooCommerce online booking products based on your unique requirements.

In addition to this, the plugin also comes with built-in functionality that lets you set up conditional pricing for booking products on your WooCommerce site. This way, you can offer discounts based on specific criteria set by you. For instance, you can offer a 5% discount when customers rent a car for over 5 days.

You can also set up premium and discount pricing for specific periods in the year for your online booking products. This way, you can charge extra for busy periods of the year and offer a discount during quieter periods without having to change these manually every time.

Bookings for WooCommerce also makes it easy to manage inventory for bookable products and equipment rentals on your WooCommerce site. This is especially useful to keep track of your inventory when you want to rent out multiple versions of the same product. For instance, you can know how many items are available to rent when renting multiple rooms in the same hotel, or renting 10 identical bikes.

If you want to add even more flexibility to Bookings for WooCommerce, there are a couple of plugins that integrate seamlessly with it: WooCommerce Product Add-Ons Ultimate and WooCommerce Deposits and Parts Payments. This way, you can create bookable products while ensuring an optimal and frictionless shopping experience on your online store.

Pricing – You can opt for the Basic plan for $59 that’s only available to use on one site or the Pro plan for $99 if you want to use it on unlimited sites. You can also get a lifetime license by making a one-time purchase.

This is a far better option than paying for WooCommerce Bookings for just one year, as you can get the Pro lifetime license for Bookings for WooCommerce at the same price. It’s clear Bookings for WooCommerce offers more value when you compare the two plugins.

2. WooCommerce Bookings And Appointments

WooCommerce Bookings And Appointments is a robust online booking system plugin that makes it very simple to create online bookings on your WooCommerce site.

It’s a versatile plugin that makes it easy to set up online bookings as well as WooCommerce appointment scheduling on your online store. Depending on your bookable products and services, customers can choose between a start and end day, or a start and end time as they wish. You can also offer recurring bookings or let customers book multiple series of dates in a single order. For instance, a customer might want to rent out a hotel hall for two days but on separate weeks.

The WooCommerce Bookings And Appointments plugin also lets you set up dynamic price calculations on your WooCommerce site. This way, your booking product’s price is automatically calculated by factoring in the number of days selected, the number of people, the total services selected, and the applicable discounts used by the customers. In addition to this, you can also add custom fields such as text boxes, checkboxes, or dropdown menus to create a sort of booking form.

There’s a lot of flexibility here but keep in mind that to get the most out of this plugin, you’ll need to integrate with some additional WooCommerce extensions. While the plugin offers basic online booking functionality, it’s still not comparable to what the Bookings for WooCommerce plugin offers. It’s also important to note that it’s more expensive compared to Bookings for WooCommerce.

Pricing – The single-site license for WooCommerce Bookings And Appointments costs $99.

3. YITH Booking and Appointment for WooCommerce

The YITH Booking and Appointment for WooCommerce plugin is a user-friendly plugin that offers a complete solution for creating online booking products on your WooCommerce site.

The plugin gives you full control over how online bookings are displayed on your WooCommerce site. This means you can customise the booking time slots, and offer hourly, daily, weekly, or monthly bookings for any bookable services (such as a spa treatment). It’s perfect for offering multiple types of online booking products on the same WooCommerce site. For instance, if you own a gym you could offer hourly booking options for personal training, and also offer daily or weekly booking options for fitness classes.

The YITH Booking and Appointment for WooCommerce plugin also gives you multiple options for setting up conditional pricing for your online booking products including creating “person types” to trigger discounts. For example, you can offer senior citizens over 65 a discount when they book a pool day through your WooCommerce site.

Additionally, you also have the option to create free or paid resources that customers can select as add-ons when setting booking options. This way, you can charge extra or offer complimentary services to users who make bookings with your business. For instance, you can offer free breakfast as an add-on when customers book hotel rooms or set an extra charge for customers who select the room service add-on.

While the plugin is great for setting up bookings on your WordPress site, it’s quite expensive, costing around the same as WooCommerce Bookings.

Pricing – You can get the YITH Booking and Appointment for WooCommerce for $249.99 per year.

4. Booking and Appointment Plugin for WooCommerce

Booking and Appointment Plugin for WooCommerce is a simple yet powerful plugin that comes with many of the essential booking features.

The plugin offers an intuitive way of creating online booking products on your WooCommerce site. Customers can easily select their desired booking dates based on their booking availability or the available booking dates of the product. Once customers complete the payment process (using whichever payment gateway you’re using such as PayPal) and check out from your WooCommerce site, they will automatically receive booking reminders.

The plugin also integrates with Zoom so you can generate online meeting links doubling as an appointment booking plugin. The flexible plugin allows you to create bookable products with simple, variable, grouped, bundle, composite, and subscription products. While it’s great in terms of functionality, it’s one of the more expensive plugins on the list.

Pricing – The single site license or the Starter package plan will cost you $199 per year.

5. RnB WooCommerce Booking and Rental Plugin

RnB WooCommerce Booking and Rental Plugin is a popular online bookings plugin that is best suited for adding rental products such as bikes, dresses, cars, and equipment to your ecommerce store.

The plugin offers extensive pricing options that make it easy to set up pricing that’s relevant to your booking product or service. For instance, when renting out a car, you can set the pricing by kilometer.

RnB WooCommerce Booking and Rental Plugin also comes pre-built with multiple layouts that help you quickly set up online bookings on your WooCommerce site. This includes responsive templates such as the “Basic Layout”, “Uber-Like Layout”, “Hourly Booking Feature”, “Inventory Variations”, and “Appointment Booking Feature”.

The best part about the plugin is its price, but it might be better to spend a bit more for a better plugin.

Pricing – You can get started with RnB WooCommerce Booking and Rental Plugin for $29.

6. PinPoint

PinPoint is an online bookings plugin that runs on WordPress but also seamlessly integrates with WooCommerce sites.

If you have a WooCommerce site, you can set up online bookings with your existing payment gateways (such as PayPal or Stripe) which makes it easier for you to quickly start renting out bookable products.

Customers on the front end will be able to make bookings from your site thanks to the plugin’s responsive layout that stays the same across all devices.

Additionally, you can also use booking calendar extensions to add extras, booking forms, discounts, taxes and fees, and coupon fields. While it’s a great plugin overall, it’s still more expensive than Bookings for WooCommerce if you want to purchase the license for more than one site.

Pricing – You can get started with PinPoint for $70 per year for one WordPress site while the five-site license will cost you $140, which is significantly higher than Bookings for WooCommerce.

7. Booking Calendar

Booking Calendar is an intuitive plugin that’s a very simple alternative to the WooCommerce Bookings plugin.

Although it’s quite old, it’s constantly been updated over the years and has booking calendar blocks for the Gutenberg editor. This makes it easy to showcase a booking calendar anywhere on your product pages.

Booking Calendar doesn’t require WooCommerce integration, although as we’ve discussed above, that’s not necessarily the right reason to choose a plugin. Its main advantage is the ease of use and how it lets you add a simple shortcode to display a responsive booking calendar on your WordPress page or post. It also offers Google Calendar sync.

This plugin is not at the top of our list because it has a few shortcomings. For starters, it’s visually outdated and doesn’t make for the best customer experience. You also have to approve or decline reservations made by customers manually yourself, which can be quite hectic, especially if you’re also responsible for other important business operations.

In addition to this, even the pro version features you get, although perfectly functional, are quite basic as compared to what you get with other plugins on this list like the Bookings for WooCommerce plugin.

Pricing – You can get the free version of Booking Calendar from the WordPress Plugin Directory.

8. Sales Igniter WooCommerce Bookings & Tours

Most WooCommerce bookings plugins merely add a calendar to your product page, and then a backend page where you can see a table of your bookings. But what about all the other needs of your rental business store? You need a way to edit your orders and rental dates, a way to see day by day visually for a month what your inventory is, a way to track what has been checked out and checked in. Sales Igniter WooCommerce Bookings & Tours is your ultimate solution with many exclusive features not found anywhere else. 

What’s the best alternative to WooCommerce Bookings?

Out of all the WooCommerce Bookings alternatives in this roundup, we recommend using the Bookings for WooCommerce plugin.

It’s the best plugin available for most types of rental booking businesses that want an easy way to let customers make online bookings. With Bookings for WooCommerce, you can set up bookings for multiple properties or bookable products on your online store. It also lets you set up custom pricing, discounts, and date ranges for all bookable products you create.

This also means you have the flexibility to effectively set up bookings on your WooCommerce store while ensuring you can easily manage all bookings for your business from the default WordPress backend.

If you need a single-site license, you can get started with the Basic plan for only $59 per year. But if you need to use it on multiple sites, you don’t have to pay much more. You can get the Pro license for $99 per year, which is usable on unlimited sites. You can even get the lifetime licence at $149 for the basic plan and $249 for the pro plan, which saves you more money in the long run. Pick your plan and get started today with a 14-day money-back guarantee.

Bookings for WooCommerce

Accept bookings and rentals for your WooCommerce products

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Ready to start easily setting up bookings on your WooCommerce site? Get Bookings for WooCommerce today!

The post ​​7+ best WooCommerce Bookings alternatives: which is the right plugin for you? appeared first on Plugin Republic.

This is why it’s never been a better time to create your own online equipment rental marketplace. You can grab the attention of prospective clients who are looking to rent out equipment for projects and make it profitable for your business to purchase equipment and rent it out to customers.

In this in-depth guide, we’re going to explore what makes the equipment rental industry so successful and see how you can set up your own marketplace using WooCommerce. We’ll also cover some best practices to optimise your equipment rental business.

What makes the equipment rental industry so profitable and fast-growing?

Before we jump into how you can rent out equipment on a WooCommerce store, it’s important to understand what makes the rental industry so profitable.

If we’re talking about starting a construction equipment rental business, the initial capital required for new construction machines is extremely high. This can be one of the major reasons why contractors and construction companies shift towards construction equipment rental.

In addition to this, maintenance overhead, high taxes, depreciation costs, and equipment insurance costs also contribute to construction companies renting out their equipment so they can cut down business costs associated with running a construction business.

Renting construction equipment also protects a builder from unexpected financial downturns while providing access to a diverse range of technologically advanced equipment. This is why renting construction equipment not only makes financial sense because it reduces the cost of purchasing new equipment but also because it reduces recurring business expenses such as labour, maintenance, and daily operational costs.

The best part about equipment rental is that it does not necessarily require high initial costs. For instance, you can rent out general equipment like power tools, lawn tractors, vehicles, compact tractors, or small excavators instead of buying expensive construction machinery right off the bat.

Similarly, you can also rent equipment that’s mainly used by homeowners and businesses for events such as tents, tables, chairs, lights, decorations, plates, glassware, portable restrooms, concession equipment, or other types of furniture used for events globally.

How to rent out equipment on a WooCommerce store

While WooCommerce offers a great platform for selling products and online services, it’s not designed to list products that require a booking or extra details from the customer before they purchase the product.

The good news is that you can use a WooCommerce plugin to accept bookings for the equipment listed as products in your store.

The Bookings for WooCommerce plugin is designed to help you sell date-based booking products.

Bookings for WooCommerce

Accept bookings and rentals for your WooCommerce products

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The plugin offers an intuitive solution that lets you accept calendar-based bookings for your WooCommerce products. You can use it to list any construction equipment for rent by publishing it as a WooCommerce product and letting users book it using a calendar on the front-end.

This way, customers can select both: their booking starting date and their booking ending date using the separate “check-in” and “check-out” fields on the front-end of your equipment rental website.

The Bookings for WooCommerce plugin offers one of the easiest ways to sell products that can be rented such as accommodations, vehicles, and equipment. The plugin comes with a wide range of features that let you create a seamless booking experience on your equipment rental marketplace.

Step #1: Install and activate the Bookings for WooCommerce plugin

To get started, install and activate the Bookings for WooCommerce plugin on your website. You can download the plugin’s .ZIP file using the link given to you at the time of purchase. Next, navigate to Plugins → Add New from the WordPress admin panel.

Upload the plugin on your WooCommerce site and make sure to activate the plugin before continuing. Once the plugin is installed on your WordPress site, activate it. Finally, head over to WooCommerce → Settings → Bookings and paste your license key in the Licence key field.

Click on the Save changes button to continue.

Step #2: Add your equipment as a bookable product

Now, with the Bookings for WooCommerce plugin installed, navigate to Products → Add New to add your equipment as a bookable product on your online store.

Set basic product details such as product title, images, and descriptions. Now, scroll down to the Product data meta box and select Booking using the product type dropdown menu.

This will transform your simple product into a bookable product that users can book for a specific time period.

Step #3: Set important parameters

Now that your equipment is set as a bookable product, it’s time to configure important parameters for your rental product.

For starters, you need to set the Booking unit dropdown menu to either Day, Night, or Week. This will define if users can book equipment for multiple nights or days, or if you want to rent it out on a weekly basis. You can also specify how many times a user can rent out your equipment in a day, night, or week using the Max bookings per unit (quantity) field.

The Max booking length field lets you put a maximum limit on the total number of days, nights, or weeks a user can book your equipment for. For instance, if you want to only allow users to book your equipment for 14 days, you can set the field to 14. Similarly, you can also set the Min booking length field to specify the minimum limit that a user has to book the equipment.

Using the Bookings start dropdown menu, you can specify the day of the week a booking starts. This makes it easier to start charging users according to your own business policies.

The Postpone start lets you set a minimum notice period before a user can book your equipment. For example, you can set a 2 day notice so it’s easier for you to manage product availability and all logistics involved in handing over equipment to users who rent them. You can also use the Buffer period field to specify the time needed for your business to handle all operations after a booking ends.

Finally, using the Standard cost field, you can specify the price per unit of booking for your equipment. In addition to this, it’s also possible to set the Last bookable date so you can rent out equipment for a specific period of time. For instance, you can rent out equipment until the lease period ends. This way, you can pay off your equipment lease fees using the revenue generated by renting it on your WooCommerce site.

Step #4: Customise the booking experience

Now, with all important parameters of the bookable product set up, it’s time to start customising the WooCommerce booking experience. The Bookings for WooCommerce plugin offers a wide range of options that let you change the overall look and feel of your bookable product on the front-end.

To begin with, you can add in your availability and block the dates that you don’t want to rent your equipment out in the back-end. To do this, click on the Add Date Range button and specify the start and end dates. You can set the Cost Per Unit field to 0 to prevent specific dates from being booked by customers or clients on the front end of your WordPress site. For instance, you can block WooCommerce bookings for holidays like the 4th of July or for Christmas.

You can also set up a time period where you want to charge more (or less) than usual. This way, you can offer more flexible pricing depending on peak or off seasons. For instance, if every first week of a month is busy for your business, you can charge an additional fee for each booking per unit. To do this, simply set the dates by creating a new date range and specify the additional expense in the Cost Per Unit field.

Another great feature of the Bookings for WooCommerce plugin is that it lets you offer discounts to users who rent out your equipment. For example, you can offer a 5% discount if customers book the equipment for at least 10 days. To do this, set the Discount Rate field under the Discounts section and specify the minimum duration required to qualify for the discount and the percentage value of the discount.

Make sure to click on the Publish button to save changes on the front-end of your WooCommerce site.

Step #5: Preview

Now, users can rent out your equipment directly from your ecommerce site using an intuitive calendar-based booking interface.

Users can view two separate fields, the “Check-in” and the “Check-out” field that let them select their own booking start and end date.

Customers can only select the available dates, while days that you don’t want to rent out equipment will be marked “not available” or appear gray-ed out.

Once the users select their desired booking details, they will be given a total price for the booking plus the discount they receive, if any.

The great thing about the Bookings for WooCommerce plugin is that it’s not only intuitive to set up but also helps you create user-friendly and easy-to-use bookable product pages on your online store.

For instance, you can create a bookable product with a delayed start. This will let you manage all logistical and management aspects of sending out the bookable product to your customers once they check in their dates. This also means if a customer wants to make a booking today, they can only book it after the specified delay time.

You can also set up bookings that require a different unit per price. This means you can rent out accommodation or hotel rooms by charging customers a price per week.

This level of flexibility in terms of setting up bookable products online makes the Bookings for WooCommerce plugin suitable for all kinds of rental items. This can include anything from vehicle rentals and equipment rentals to hotel bookings.

Best practices to follow when creating a WooCommerce equipment rental marketplace

It’s crucial to offer a seamless booking experience on your equipment rental marketplace so it encourages more sales. This is one of the best ways to create a successful equipment rental marketplace where users can easily book the equipment they need, whenever they need it.

However, you also need to consider some best practices to follow when creating your WooCommerce equipment rental marketplace to ensure its success.

Let’s go over a few of them in detail:

Mobile-friendly

One of the major aspects of any type of online booking process is that it should be fully mobile-friendly. Since most users browse the internet on their mobile phones, you need to offer them an easy way to rent out your equipment without having to open your site on another device that supports it. It’s one of the best ways to encourage more bookings and generate more revenue for your business. In fact, a study found that the total number of bookings coming from mobile devices went from 41% to 60% after the introduction of a mobile app.

Supports major payment gateways

Another important aspect of any successful equipment rental marketplace is that it supports all the top, most popular, and relevant payment gateways. You want to make it easy for users to pay you when booking equipment and offer a frictionless checkout experience.

Collaborate with other businesses

You also want to collaborate with businesses that are relevant to yours to personalise and enhance the booking experience. For instance, if you rent out construction equipment, you can talk to construction companies and offer them to rent out their equipment as an additional service. Similarly, if you rent out decorations for events, you can talk to event planners, venues, and schools and rent out their equipment for them. This not only helps your business generate more revenue but also helps you establish yourself as the expert in your industry.

Offer discounts

Ideally, you also want to offer customers discounts on longer rental periods. This is because it encourages customers to book your products for a longer period of time while also paying you more money. This is a great way to increase your average order value and enable a steady source of income for your business.

Conclusion

Setting up equipment rentals makes it easy for customers to book equipment for a certain period of time without having to worry about purchasing it from the outset. This way, you can charge customers for each day, night, or for each week they rent out your equipment. As a result, you can pay off taxes, maintenance costs, or equipment insurance costs without having to let go of your valuable assets.

A great way to do this on your ecommerce site is by using the Bookings for WooCommerce plugin. It offers you all the functionality you need to create a bookable product in WooCommerce that lets users select their booking start and end date directly from the product page using a calendar widget. This makes it the perfect solution for creating a personalised, optimised booking experience for renting equipment online, without having to touch a single line of code.

Bookings for WooCommerce

Accept bookings and rentals for your WooCommerce products

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Ready to start setting up equipment rentals on your WooCommerce site? Get Bookings for WooCommerce today!

The post Set up equipment rentals in your WooCommerce store: a complete guide (2023) appeared first on Plugin Republic.

If you’re running a hospitality website – whether it’s a hotel, resort, or another type of accommodation – it is important that you focus your efforts on creating a personalised and conversion-optimised booking experience. After all, more and more people research and make their bookings online nowadays.

Accommodation bookings work a bit differently than other eCommerce products in WooCommerce-based sites. In this tutorial, we’ll explain how to set up hotel and accommodation bookings on your WooCommerce store in a few steps. We’ll also show you how to optimise it for better sales using only one plugin.

Why does the booking experience matter and what kind of booking experience should I create on my website?

Did you know that over 90% of all travellers expect a personalised experience when they book a hotel?

In other words, if your hotel or accommodation booking site is behind, you could potentially miss out on conversions due to customer dissatisfaction. This also means that you can significantly improve conversions for your booking website simply by changing a few elements and delivering a better experience.

To optimise sales and minimise cart or booking abandonment rates, it’s important that you create a personalised booking experience that caters to your target audience. There are many factors to consider including:

• How many days a traveller might want to stay.
• The traveller’s budget.
• The number of people staying per booking.
• Basic amenities they might expect throughout their stay.
• The location of the hotel.

That’s why your booking experience needs to offer flexible and comprehensive options.

Things to keep in mind when enabling an accommodation booking system

To sum it up, these are the different factors you need to keep in mind from a technical standpoint when enabling a hotel or accommodation booking system:

• It should be mobile-friendly. There’s an app for everything, and the hotel and accommodation industry is no exception. Some companies reported an increase from 41% to 60% of total bookings coming from mobile devices after the introduction of an app. In just the US alone, mobile bookings have increased from $65 billion to $108 billion in five years.
• Smooth booking process. The booking process on your hotel and accommodation website has to be quick, easy, and efficient. At the very least, travellers should be able to choose dates, pick an accommodation type, and complete payments without any hassle.
• Personalised experience. The hotel and accommodation booking system should support extra personalised services to help you stand out from the competition and push your brand identity. The booking process should allow guests to book special deals, use discount codes, and buy extra services like local tours and activities.

How to set up hotel and accommodation bookings in WooCommerce

There are two ways to set up hotel and accommodation bookings in WordPress: the hard way involves adding code to your site’s core files and the easy way involves using a WooCommerce accommodation booking plugin.

Let”s see both methods.

Option #1: Code

Coding functionality into your website for booking accommodations with plenty of features can certainly be done. But unless you’re an experienced coder yourself, it can be very difficult. Outsourcing can get quite expensive and comes with its own set of problems.

Nevertheless, coding the functionality into your website, whether you do it yourself or through an outsourced company, is a reasonable albeit complicated option.

That said, the safest and best way to enable accommodation bookings in WooCommerce is to use a plugin.

Option #2: WooCommerce accommodation bookings plugin

The great thing about WooCommerce is that you can rely on a plugin for functionality that would otherwise be quite tedious to code. This is where the Bookings for WooCommerce plugin comes in.

Bookings for WooCommerce

Accept bookings and rentals for your WooCommerce products

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With this plugin, you can display rooms and accommodations as WooCommerce products. It also lets you add a simple booking form to your single product page where customers can choose their check-in and check-out dates.

Once that’s done, they can add their booking to their cart as they normally would and then proceed to the checkout page. After payment, customers will receive an email notification with their booking details.

Bookings can be monitored and updated directly from the WordPress dashboard.

The Bookings for WooCommerce plugin has everything thought through. It ensures your calendars are automatically updated to prevent users from making duplicate bookings or booking during a blocked-out period. It also automatically calculates the duration of the booking and displays the cost, taking into account any non-standard cost periods that may be included in the user’s booking.

In addition to all of this, Bookings for WooCommerce also has other useful features like:

• Single and multiple bookings.
• Buffer periods before and after bookings.
• Booking availability management.
• User bank-end monitoring and dashboard.

The Bookings for WooCommerce plugin is by far the simplest and most reliable way of incorporating hotel and accommodation booking functionality into your website. It’s easy to use for non-developers and developers alike.

How to enable hotel and accommodation bookings with the Bookings for WooCommerce plugin

Here, we’ll show you step-by-step how to enable hotel and accommodation bookings in WooCommerce. For this tutorial, you’ll need the Bookings for WooCommerce plugin.

Once you’ve installed and activated it on your WordPress website, you’re ready to move to step one.

Step #1: Define booking units

Log into your WordPress admin panel and create a new WooCommerce product to get started. Here’s what you need to do:

1. Navigate to Products > Add New to create your product and select Booking in product type.

2. After creating your bookable product you can assign some parameters in the Booking tab from the Product data section using booking units. Booking units are a measure of the length of booking either by day, by night, or by week.
3. Select one of the following booking units:
   1. Day – allows the booking to start and end on the same day.
   2. Night – option bookings start on one day and end on a different day. This is the option most commonly used by hotels and other accommodations.
   3. Week – will measure booking units in weekly increments.

Step #2: Allocate quantity

The next step is to allocate quantity to the booking unit to allow products to be booked individually or in groups. You can use this option to rent out multiple hotel rooms from a single product.

You can do this using the Max bookings per unit (quantity) option and then limiting the product’s Stock. This way, when a user makes a booking, the stock will reduce by one unit. So, for example, if you have 10 rooms and a guest books one room for a set of dates, the availability is reduced to 9 across those dates.

Step #3: Specify buffers

To block off the time at the end of each booking you can use the Buffer period option. This lets you specify which days of the week bookings are available and block off dates where bookings are unavailable.

This option is very useful if you rent out your hotel or accommodation on a weekly basis. You can have a buffer period of a day between two bookings to allow you time to maintain, clean, and replenish supplies for the next booking.

Step #4: Set minimum and maximum booking periods

The Bookings for WooCommerce plugin lets you set up the minimum and maximum booking period entry field.

• Min booking length. Here you can enter the minimum amount of booking units (day, night, or week) that can be selected by the user.
• Max booking length. If you want to have a limit on how long a bookable product can be delegated to one person then you can set the upper limit using this option. This is also measured in the booking units you have set.

The minimum and maximum booking periods are particularly useful for spaces like galleries, conference halls, and event venues. For example, you can let guests book a gallery for a minimum of 2 days and a maximum of 5 days.

Step #5: Set dynamic pricing rules

Most hotels and other accommodation businesses are subject to both peak seasons and off-seasons. To better deal with that, there are a few different options that you can use to create a dynamic pricing system for your bookable products.

Standard cost

This is the basic cost of your booking unit. The value you enter here multiplied by the booking unit selected will be set as your standard price. For example, if the Standard cost is £50 and a guest books for 4 days, the total cost will amount to £200.

Non Standard Costs

You can use this option to select the date ranges where standard costs do not apply.

You can set it up by scrolling down to the Non Standard Costs section. Here you can select the date range and the cost per unit of the non-standard period.

Step #6: Discounts

The Bookings for WooCommerce plugin makes it easy to offer guests discounts. Here’s how:

1. Navigate to Product data > Bookings and scroll down to the Discounts section.
2. Set the Discount Rate field by entering the percentage value of discount.
3. Set the After field by entering the duration (in booking units) for the discount to take effect.
4. Use the Apply From dropdown menu to select either All to apply the discount to the entire booking period or Partial to apply the discount to only the period that qualifies after the minimum booking.

Preview

Here’s what it looks like on the front end:

Guests can use the Check-in and Check-out options in the booking calendar to make their booking. The booking calendar shows the available dates guests can book.

The Bookings for WooCommerce plugin will automatically calculate the total cost of their stay in real-time. Then, guests can click the Book Now button to make their booking.

Conclusion

We showed you how you can quickly and easily create a bookable product for your hotel or accommodation site using the Bookings for WooCommerce plugin.

The plugin helps you optimise and personalise your hotel or accommodation booking process for prospective guests. You can also use it to set up non-standard costs in the off-season and offer discounts to incentivise guests to book longer stays.

Bookings for WooCommerce

Accept bookings and rentals for your WooCommerce products

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As tourism bounces back post-pandemic, get the Bookings for WooCommerce plugin to maximise conversions for your business.

The post How to accept hotel and accommodation bookings with WooCommerce appeared first on Plugin Republic.

Our equipment rental product will have the following features:

• Users will be able to select a start date and end date for their rental period
• We’ll be able to assign a cost per rental period unit, e.g. per day or per week
• Users will be able to select more than one item to hire during the booking period
• We’ll track inventory of the items across the entire rental period to ensure that users aren’t able to rent an item that’s out of stock
• We’ll also look at assigning different costs for our products at different times of the year

WooCommerce equipment rental plugin

In order to achieve all this, we’ll need WooCommerce and the Bookings for WooCommerce plugin:

Bookings for WooCommerce

Accept bookings and rentals for your WooCommerce products

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Bookings for WooCommerce allows you to create bookable products in WooCommerce.

How to create a rental product in WooCommerce

Let’s start by setting up the product page for our rental product. In this example, we have a total of ten drones that we can rent out at any one time but we don’t need to create a separate product page for each one. Instead, we just create one product page and assign an inventory of 10.

There’s a demo version of this product here.

To create our rental product, just create a new WooCommerce product and set the ‘Product Type’ to ‘Booking’.

You can then start to enter some data related to your rental product:

• Booking unit
  The booking unit is the basic duration unit that your equipment rental is measured in. We’ll select ‘Day’ here for our rental product.
• Max bookings per unit (quantity)
  This is the same as inventory, i.e. the number of times this product can be rented out per booking unit (day, night, week). For our drone product, we’ll enter 10 here as we have 10 units that we can rent out at any time
• Booking start day
  If you wish, you can specify a day of the week that each booking must start on. So if we only wanted to allow our equipment rental to start on Monday, we could enter that here.
• Minimum and maximum booking lengths
  Use this setting to define a minimum or maximum booking length for the equipment hire.
• Postpone start
  If you need to have a notice period before a rental can start, you can enter a value here
• Buffer period
  Likewise, if you need a period after each rental ends, you can enter a value here. For example, you might need to check the returned equipment before making it available for the next rental
• Standard cost
  This is the cost per booking unit – in our example, the cost per day for each drone

Here are our updated settings. Note that you can see the rental status of the product on the Availability tab. This allows you to track the inventory status of your equipment day by day.

We can see this rental product on the front end now:

Now the user can select the start and end dates for the booking; they can choose how many drones they want to rent; and the plugin will calculate the duration and the cost.

When the user checks out, the plugin will adjust the inventory for the product across the period of the rental.

Assigning different rental costs for different times of the year

Let’s imagine that we want to set higher prices for our equipment at certain times of the year. We can do this on the Custom Pricing Tab using the ‘Custom Pricing’ setting:

Just enter a date range where you’d like to charge a non-standard cost. Enter the new price in the ‘Cost Per Unit’ field.

If you’d like to make rentals unavailable during a certain period, just enter 0 in the ‘Cost Per Unit’ field.

WooCommerce equipment rental recap

That’s a very quick tutorial on how to rent out equipment using WooCommerce. You’ll just need the Bookings for WooCommerce plugin:

Bookings for WooCommerce

Accept bookings and rentals for your WooCommerce products

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The post WooCommerce equipment rental: how to hire out products appeared first on Plugin Republic.

Creating WooCommerce bookable products

This post will walk through creating a bookable product in WooCommerce step by step. We’ll look at some of the types of products that need to be bookable, as well as the parameters we can set for them.

There are a couple of demo products that we’ll refer to during the article so that we can see working examples of bookable products in WooCommerce.

You can use the following menu to navigate the article.

WooCommerce bookings plugin

WooCommerce doesn’t have a bookable product type by default. So, we’ll need to install a plugin: Bookings for WooCommerce.

Bookings for WooCommerce

Accept bookings and rentals for your WooCommerce products

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As it’s name suggests, Bookings for WooCommerce will allow us to accept bookings on our WooCommerce site. It’s integrated with other key WooCommerce plugins (see below) and will work with any WooCommerce-compatible theme.

Read on to see how easy it is to create bookable products using this plugin.

How to create a WooCommerce bookable product

Once you’ve installed and activated Bookings for WooCommerce, you can follow these steps to create your first bookable product:

1. Go to Products > Add New to create your new product
2. Enter a title, content and any images you wish
3. In the ‘Product data’ section, select ‘Booking’ from the list of product types

You’ve now created your first bookable product.

WooCommerce bookable product parameters

Once you’ve created your product and assigned it the ‘Booking’ product type, you’ll want to set some parameters. These will depend on the type of product you’re booking out so let’s go through each parameter and take a look at a couple of examples.

You’ll notice that you’ve got a new ‘Booking’ tab in the ‘Product data’ section. All the parameters for bookable products can be accessed there.

Booking unit

The booking unit is how we measure the length of the booking. You can choose from:

• Day
• Night
• Week

If you choose ‘Day’, then bookings can start and end on the same day (though they can last longer as well if you like). Typical bookable products using ‘Day’ as the unit might include tool hire. Here’s an example of bookable product using ‘Day’ as the booking unit.

If you choose ‘Night’ then bookings will start and end on a different day (they run overnight). Typical bookable products using ‘Night’ as the unit might include hotels or accommodation. Here’s an example of a WooCommerce bookable product that uses ‘Night’ as the booking unit.

And if you choose ‘Week’ then bookings will be measured in weekly units. A typical example would be property or holiday rentals. Here’s an example product using ‘Week’ as the booking unit.

Bookings start

If you wish, you can specify a day of the week where a booking must start. You can just choose ‘Any’ here if it doesn’t matter what day of the week the booking starts.

This setting will work whatever unit you have specified.

This can be particularly useful if you are renting out a weekend cottage, for example, and you only want the bookable product to be available on Friday.

Or you might have an exhibition or gallery space which you are renting out on a weekly basis but you always want the handover day to be a Thursday.

Min booking length

This is an optional setting which allows you to specify a minimum period for the booking. The value you enter here will be measured in the booking unit.

So if you are renting out your weekend cottage on a nightly basis, you can specify ‘2’ as the minimum booking length to ensure that your customers can’t book for a single night.

Max booking length

Again, this is an optional setting that allows you to define a maximum period. The value you enter here will be measured in the booking unit.

So if you want to ensure that your customers can’t book your holiday property for longer than 3 weeks, just enter ‘3’ in the ‘Max booking length’ field and use ‘Week’ as the booking unit.

Postpone start

If you like, you can prevent anyone from starting their booking immediately. You can use this setting if you need a minimum notice period before your bookable product is available.

Let’s imagine you’re hiring out your yacht and you need a couple of days notice to get it ready before any booking starts. So you can set the ‘Postpone start’ field to ‘2’ to ensure you’ve got 2 days’ notice.

The ‘Postpone start’ setting is always measured in days, irrespective of the booking unit you’ve selected for your bookable product.

Buffer period

The buffer period allows you to block off time at the end of a booking. The buffer period is always measured in days but it’s most commonly used when the booking unit is in weeks.

As an example, imagine you’re renting out a holiday villa. Customers book the villa on a weekly basis but you’d like to ensure that you always have a day clear at the end of the booking to clean and prepare for the next guests.

You can achieve this by setting the ‘buffer period’ to ‘1’. This means that if the customer starts their booking on a Tuesday and books for one week, the booking will come to an end on the following Monday.

If you are also using the ‘Bookings start’ parameter to define what day of the week your bookable products are available from, then the buffer period means you have extra control and predictability over your bookings.

(By the way, if you are renting out holiday villas or similar, take a look at this article on how to accept deposits on bookings in WooCommerce.)

Standard cost

This is how you define the cost of your WooCommerce bookable product. The value that you enter here will be multiplied by the duration of the booking. So if your booking unit is ‘Day’, the standard cost is $50, and the customer books for 2 days – the total cost will be $100.

Last bookable date

If you would like to limit how far into the future your product can be booked, you can set the ‘Last bookable date’ parameter.

For example, if you are not accepting bookings on your holiday rental beyond the end of 31 December 2022, then enter the date here. You can update this setting at any time you like to adjust the last bookable date.

Blocking out dates for your bookable product

Let’s look at a couple of slightly more advanced parameters that you might need. Firstly, let’s look at how to block out specific date ranges so that your product can’t be booked.

Maybe you’d like to reserve some time to use your own holiday rental. To block out specific dates, click the ‘Add Date Range’ button in the ‘Non Standard Costs’ section.

Set the start and end dates for the blocked period, then set the ‘Cost per Unit’ to 0. You can set as many dates as you wish.

Setting peak or reduced prices in your WooCommerce bookable product

A common requirement with bookable products is to set prices according to season or demand. For instance, you might reduce the price of your rental property in the winter, or ask more for periods that include public or school holidays.

To adjust the standard booking cost during certain periods, add a date range in the ‘Non Standard Costs’ section as above. In the ‘Cost per Unit’ field, enter the price per booking unit for that period.

Enabling discounts on bookable products

Discounting is an effective marketing tool. You might want to offer a discount to users on your bookable products based on the duration of the booking.

For instance, you’re hiring out a bike and you’d like to offer a discount of 10% on bookings longer than 3 days. There’s two ways you can do this:

• Firstly, enable the discount on the whole booking
• Or, alternatively, enable the discount just on the period of the booking that goes past 3 days

To create the discount:

• Enter the percentage value of the discount in the ‘Discount Rate’ field in the ‘Discounts’ section
• Enter the minimum duration required to qualify for the discount in the ‘After’ field. The unit here will be the same as the booking unit
• Then either choose ‘All’ if you want the discount to apply for the whole booking or ‘Partial’ if the discount will only apply to the period of the booking beyond the minimum duration

You can see an example of a bookable product with discount based on booking duration here.

(You should read this article for more information about WooCommerce discounts on non-bookable products.)

WooCommerce bookable products – recap

In this article we looked at how to quickly and easily set up a bookable product in WooCommerce. We looked at parameters to refine our bookable product and linked to several examples.

We also looked at some more advanced settings like how to block out dates or offer discounts on extended bookings.

All you need to get started is the Bookings for WooCommerce plugin.

Bookings for WooCommerce

Accept bookings and rentals for your WooCommerce products

Find Out More

The post WooCommerce bookable products – accepting bookings on your store appeared first on Plugin Republic.

How to accept deposits for bookings in WooCommerce

Let’s pretend you own this nice looking holiday villa.

You’d like to let it out to holidaymakers and make some money back for yourself. In this tutorial, we’ll walk through the process of creating a bookable product for the villa in WooCommerce then learn how to accept deposits on it. You can see how the demo product works here.

This is what our product will look like:

Note that the demo uses the Twenty Twenty theme, but this method will work with any WooCommerce compatible theme.

You can use this menu to navigate the article:

Creating the product in WooCommerce

To accept deposits on bookings, you’ll need two plugins: Bookings for WooCommerce and WooCommerce Deposits and Part Payments.

First of all, let’s look at creating our bookings product in WooCommerce. In our case, the product will be the villa but you can extend this to any type of product.

You’ll need to have the Bookings for WooCommerce plugin installed for this stage.

Bookings for WooCommerce

Accept bookings and rentals for your WooCommerce products

Find Out More

Creating the product

We’ll create the product in exactly the same way as we would create any other WooCommerce product. Go to Products > Add New and enter the product details.

Setting the booking parameters

Once you’ve entered the product information, change the ‘Product type’ to ‘Booking’.

You’ll see a number of new fields appear. Let’s use these to set the parameters for our booking.

• Booking unit: this is what we’ll use to measure the duration of a booking. Choose from ‘Day’, ‘Night’, or ‘Week’.
• Booking start: you might want to specify a day of the week that your bookings always start from
• Min booking length: the minimum duration that the booking can last. The length is set according to the booking unit above
• Max booking length: the maximum duration that the booking can last. The length is set according to the booking unit above. Leave this field empty if you don’t want a maximum length
• Postpone start: enter a value here if you don’t want customers to make a booking for an immediate start. For example, if you need two days’ notice, enter 2 in this field
• Buffer period: you might want to set a period at the end of each booking, for example to clean and prepare for the next guests
• Standard cost: this is an important one. Enter the standard cost per booking unit

In our example, we’ve used the following settings:

This means that our booking is measured in days. Bookings will be between 7 and 21 days, at a cost of $150 per day.

At this stage, your product will now be available for users to book by choosing their start and end dates. The cost of the booking will be calculated automatically and, once the customer makes the purchase, the product will no longer be available to be booked for the selected dates.

Accepting deposits for bookings in WooCommerce

Now we’ll look at how to accept deposits for the booking. For this section, you’ll need to have the WooCommerce Deposit and Part Payments plugin enabled.

WooCommerce Deposits and Part Payments

Provide flexible payment options on products and orders

Find Out More

Once the plugin is enabled, we can quickly add the ability to accept deposits on our bookings product. Let’s look at a couple of options.

Accepting fixed amount deposits on bookings in WooCommerce

Firstly, let’s imagine we want to take a fixed deposit for each booking.

• Go to WooCommerce > Settings > Deposits
• Choose ‘All Products’ in the ‘Accept Deposits’ field
• Choose ‘Fixed Amount’ in the ‘Deposit Type’ field
• Enter the value of the deposit – in this case, 200
• Finally, set the ‘Default Payment Method’ to ‘Deposit’ to ensure the customer’s payment will default to the deposit rather than to paying the whole amount in one

Check out the demo product to see this in action.

Accepting deposits as percentages on bookings in WooCommerce

If we want to accept a percentage of the total cost as a deposit, then follow the steps above – but change the following:

• In ‘Deposit Type’, choose ‘Percentage’
• Enter a percentage, e.g. 10, in the ‘Deposit Amount’ field

Check out this article for more information on WooCommerce deposits.

Processing the order

When the customer makes the booking with a deposit, they check out through the normal WooCommerce process.

You can see how the order is divided in the cart and checkout.

Note that the total for the item is only £200. The booking dates and the remaining balance are indicated in the line item. The remaining balance is displayed under the cart totals in the ‘Payable Later’ line.

When the customer makes the payment, the Bookings plugin blocks out the selected dates so that they’re not available to other customers. And the Deposits plugin generates two orders: the first for the value of the deposit, and the second for the remaining balance. This second order has the status of ‘Scheduled’.

The customer can pay the scheduled order at any time from the ‘Orders’ tab of their account page.

WooCommerce bookings deposit – recap

In this article, we looked at how to accept deposits for WooCommerce bookings. We looked at how to create bookable products then how to set up the deposit.

All we needed to accept deposits on bookings were two plugins: Bookings for WooCommerce and WooCommerce Deposits and Part Payments.

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