All you could want to know about Bookly as a WordPress Plugin
You’re halfway there, but you need more information to make sure Bookly is the perfect booking system for you. Whether you’re a developer or a business owner.
To see others we’ve helped, feel free to have a look at our reviews section.
Otherwise, read on to wisen up.
What is Bookly?
Bookly is a plugin for WordPress websites. With Bookly, your clients can make bookings for service right on your site. No need for time-consuming phone calls or face-to-face meetings.
According to many reviews, Bookly is the best booking plugin for WP. It’s a unique booking system that is under constant development to stay on top. Our programmers never stop working to satisfy your requests and concerns.
So if you’re ready to automate booking on your (or your client’s) website, Bookly could be the appointment software you’re looking for.
What you would need to replicate Bookly – without Bookly?
If you wanted your website to accept bookings online, you would choose Bookly, right? But what if you didn’t?
First of all, you’d need an expert programmer to set a booking system up on your website. If you didn’t wish to keep this expert on your payroll, you’d need to train up one of your current employees to keep it all running. This first step costs time and money.
Next you would have to train each of your staff members on how to use this software. This can also cost a lot of time, depending on how complicated the system is.
Then you would have to hire someone in a secretarial role to handle the bookings and allocate staff members.
It could become quite a messy business.
That’s why Bookly is such a great plugin. It takes all of these moving parts out and adds them into a simple plugin with powerful capabilities.
Let’s take a look at some of those capabilities.
What does Bookly have to offer?
* Some features require add-ons, but most don’t.
* Bookly is in a state of constant development, depending on what the community wants. Thanks to our feature request page, you decide what we develop.
Whether you’re a WP pro or beginner, our clean panel design will suit your skills and preferences. You can set Bookly up with almost no effort and have a world-class booking system working for you in no time. Managing features and appointments couldn’t be easier.
The interface has been smartly designed to fit into any web page. A booking system wouldn’t be much use if it stuck out like a sore thumb now, would it? The booking page is simply designed to make using it a breeze. Your clients will breeze through it and be knocking at your door in no time. Not only that, but booking an appointment from your website is sure to impress those customers.
The booking form is fully customizable to suit your style and business. With this revolutionary booking plugin, you can:
- Change the layout of each step in the booking process
- Show or hide specific fields
- Add new fields to the process
- Change the colors to blend perfectly into your scheme
- Reorder service provider list, categories list and list of services
- Customize any of the text on the form.
You and your staff will always stay on the game. Reminders of upcoming and updated appointments made through the booking plugin will make sure of it. Never miss a booking again.
It won’t do much good if your staff are on time but your clients aren’t. Your clients will get notifications on pending, approved and cancelled bookings. Again, the notifications are customizable. Remind clients about bookings, thank customers, personalize your messages. You can even send next day agenda’s to staff and combined notifications for cart purchases.
The booking form automatically readjusts itself to fit your mobile site. This way your clients can use the booking plugin anywhere, at any time.
The backend also adapts to fit your mobile screen, so you can manage your bookings on the go, too. Because it’s your job to take of the clients, and ours to take care of you.
Whether your business is a one-man operation or a mega corporation, Bookly adapts to suit you.
You can:
- Add any number of services and staff members
- Link staff members with the services they provide and with their personal Google calendar
- Tie each employee to one or several services.
Bookly is compatible with WPML, supporting multi-language websites. The .po and .mo files allow you to translate your Bookly installation yourself, if desired.
The plugin comes with 10 built in languages:
- English
- Russian
- German
- Spanish
- French
- Italian
- Dutch
- Portuguese
- Romanian
- Swedish
- Chinese
If you need a booking plugin for your WordPress store page, we’ve got you covered yet again. Woocommerce integration allows you to use their payment gateways – for both the budding entrepreneur and established business professional.
Don’t let your client base get out of hand. With Bookly you get an unlimited, sortable and searchable customer list. But that’s not all. You can also:
- See booking and payment stats for each customer
- Store internal notes about a customer
- Add a new customer directly from the calendar
- Create and assign WordPress accounts to customers
- Delete associated WordPress account when deleting customers
- And import and export customer lists
Clients love promotions and discounts. And we all know the value of time-sensitive offers. With Bookly Coupons add-on, you can offer percentage or cash amount discounts for an influx of clients.
Have you got different staff members at different skill levels? You can add prices to reflect that with Bookly, allowing your customers a choice. Choice breeds satisfaction, and satisfaction keeps clients coming back for more!
Your team don’t have to stick to generic business hours. You can discuss and create individual booking hours for each staff member on the Bookly plugin.
You can also add breaks and annual leave right from the plugin. Not what you’d expect from a standard booking plugin, but that’s what we do – surpass expectations.
With the built-in cart feature enabled, your clients can return to the 1st page and make another booking. This way, they can order a number of bookings and pay for all of them in advance.
Bookly Custom Fields Add-on allows you to create and add your own custom fields to your booking form – with ease. Bookly is arguably the most customizable booking plugin for WordPress. That’s because we care about your needs. This shows with our feature request page, where you decide what we develop for you next.
With Google Calendar and Bookly you can manage your staff workload, hours and bookings with maximum efficiency.
Most only offer a one-way sync, but as usual we’ve gone one step further. Google Calendar syncs with Bookly and Bookly syncs with Google Calendar to make a rare two way sync possible!
Time slots booked in Bookly are automatically marked as busy in your Google Calendar. And busy slots in Google Calendar are taken into account when Bookly proposes available time slots to clients.
Secure online payments and cash on delivery work together to make your service accessible to all your clients. Paypal Express Checkout is included in Bookly standard version, and there are various add-ons for payment gateways which can be integrated with Bookly to help drive more customers from the booking plugin right to your door.
You can also filter and sort a list of complete and pending payments with payment reporting. And hide the payment step for free services. Customization is key for a booking plugin (especially for WordPress), and Bookly has tons of that.
With Bookly, you’ll have a wide range of options on every service. Including:
- Set the duration of each service separately
- Adjust minimum time slot lengths
- Set visibility to public or private for each service
- Set service category
You can export just about all data in the plugin. This includes:
- Appointments log
- Customer info
- List of customers
You can have appointments created in pending status. They’ll stay this way until you confirm them. Great for when you’re in a period of uncertain availability.
You can set weekends, holidays or days off for your entire staff roll, or for individual staff members.
All services are not created equal. We understand that and that’s why each service can have different durations. If your appointments require prep (or you need coffee between appointments) there’s the padding time option to make sure you don’t get overwhelmed.
Add a booking list (automatically updated) to your website. If your client wishes to view their appointments, they can login with their credentials, which are automatically sent to them by Bookly if you choose to create WordPress accounts for all customers.
They can then view or cancel their appointments – giving them flexibility and increasing client satisfaction.
You can assign unique colors to each of your services in the WordPress backend. That way you can keep track of appointments. This aids visual scheduling, making your life easier.
The handy progress bar will show clients how far in the booking process they are. This way they don’t get frustrated by a longer booking process – they know exactly what to expect.
You can set a minimum notice period (eg. 24, 48 hours) for cancellations. Should the client cancel in time, this will not affect them. But it will prevent them cancelling on short notice.
Sometimes life happens, and we can’t make our appointments. Bookly’s cancellation process makes it easy for clients to cancel – and shows your flexibility. The cancellation only works when it is outside of the minimum notice period, however.
Should your appointments be for groups of people, the client can specify the amount of persons they’d like to book for.
The Service Extras add-on (one of our most popular) will allow your clients to book extras with their services. You can add different extras to different services.
Is Bookly the right booking plugin for your business?
You can only ask so much from a booking plugin, unless you’re asking Bookly. Unlimited customization, staff and customer management, fully automated – just a few reasons Bookly is regarded as the best booking plugin for WordPress.
If you’re ready to let clients make appointments right on your website, it’s time to choose Bookly.
Just be sure you’re ready to handle the mass of customers Bookly is sure to reel in!
Demo :
Bookly PRO – Appointment Booking and Scheduling Software System
