Easy Appointment Booking makes sure that no double bookings happen. Here are a few examples of how the app does this.
Automatically removing timeslots when they are booked
Let’s say you have an event that takes 1 person per time slot.
If someone books the event on August 10 at 10am, the next customer who visits the page will not see August 10 10am as an available timeslot.
Automatically removing timeslots if an availability is shared
Let’s say you have a team member, Rosa, who is shared between two events, Event A and Event B. Each timeslot can take 1 person.
Someone books Event A with Rosa on August 10, 10am.
The next customer who visits Event A or Event B won't see Rosa available at August 10, 10am.
Automatically handling multiple availabilities
Let say you have Event A assigned to 3 different availabilities, Rosa, Mike and Dan. Each timeslot can take 1 person.
Someone books Event A on August 10, 10am with Rosa.
The next customer who visits Event A will see August 10,10am as an available timeslot, which can be booked with Mike or Dan. Rosa will be unavailable.
ℹ️ Note on multiple availabilities
If you have multiple availabilities -- by default, the customer selects the availability when they make a booking. If you want to automatically assign bookings between all availabilities, you can change this behavior from the Team Member Options setting.
Dealing with High Traffic Scenarios
Easy Appointment Booking has the ability to reduce double bookings automatically even when a lot of customers are trying to book a timeslot at the same time.
When many customers are visiting your site, a common way that double bookings can occur is that 2 customers will add the same timeslot to the cart seconds apart. To prevent this, go to Settings, and check the box beside “Make timeslots temporarily unavailable when a customer selects them”.
When you check this box, Easy Appointment Booking will mark the timeslot as unavailable when the first customer adds it to their cart. However, if they do not checkout in 15 minutes, the booking will be automatically removed from their cart, and the timeslot will be made available again.
For this setting to work correctly, your theme needs to have a dedicated Cart page, and not a drawer or a pop-up. To verify that your theme supports this, follow these steps:
From Shopify Admin, click on Sales Channel > Online Store from the sidebar.
Click on Themes.
Click on “Customize” beside your active theme.
On the left side, click the ⚙️ icon to go into Theme Settings.
Scroll down to Cart.
Set Cart Type to Page.
Click Save.
How could double bookings still occur?
1. The customer can increase quantity in the checkout. Although Easy Appointment does disable quantity selectors, some themes don’t play well with our code. In these themes, a customer could increase the quantity in the cart. Message us if you need help integrating with your theme.
2. Since we are a Shopify partner and there is some latency before the booking button loads, we can only commit to one booking per minute.
To explain this to your customers, Go to Settings > Text and Language and add text to convey urgency in the Booking added to cart: Email confirmation.
This will show up to your customers like the following:
Viewing double bookings and conflicts proactively
If a double booking or a booking conflict occurs, Easy Appointment Booking will try to proactively let you know! This prevents surprises on-the-day of the event or service.
View Possible Booking Conflicts on the Bookings Tab
Go to Bookings > Possible Conflicts to see any bookings that the app thinks could be potential double-bookings.
Look at yellow "conflict" badges beside Booking IDs
When Easy Appointment Booking thinks that multiple bookings are conflicting, it will add a new "Conflict" badge below the Booking ID.
If you click on this badge, it will show you all the other bookings that the app thinks are conflicting with it. For example, in the picture above we have Wilson Jones and Roland Schitt both booked at March 13 at 1pm with John Stones. John can only accept 1 appointment at a time, so this is a booking conflict.
If you click on that yelllow "Conflict" badge, it will show you all the conflicting bookings in 1 place. You can then either:
Reschedule one of the bookings, which will automatically resolve the conflict.
Manually mark the conflict as resolved, which will remove the badge from these bookings.
Ignore, and get back to this later.
Please note that Easy Appointment Booking thinks these are conflicts, so there is a chance of false positives.