Set up & manage your online bookings | Full Course | Wix Learn

Picture this. You want to book a service online. The top rated business has glowing reviews, but you'll need to call to book your appointment. Would you still choose them if you said no? You're not alone. 94% of people prefer to book with businesses that let them schedule their appointments online. I'm Ernesto, a bookings Product education specialist and throughout this course we'll go over all of the ways you can set up and manage seamless booking experiences for your clients. In this lesson, we'll get you started by setting up your services. Let's jump right in. You've might have created a site with a template that has bookings already built in, but if not, it's pretty simple to add them. Here's how you'll do it. Here in the Editor, I'll open up my Add Elements menu and head right into bookings. You can add as many of these options to your site and you'll be ready to follow along. I created this site for a nail salon to guide you through this course and I've already added some services here. All of my services, my appointments, classes and courses live on this page. They each have an image, title, price and description. To add and manage my services, I'll head over to my bookings menu in my site's dashboard. I can get there by clicking on my business from the left bar and choosing WIX Bookings. And lastly, manage Services. Here in my dashboard I can see all the services I've already created, add new services and manage things like my settings, payments and booking calendar. To start, let's add a new service together. So I'll have all of these pre built templates here, but for now I'm going to build an appointment from scratch. I'll keep the service type as an appointment and then fill in all of this information. You want your title to be straightforward and easy to understand, so I'll go super simple and just call it Manicure and I'll add a catchy tagline as well. Then when you're writing your description, keep in mind the keywords your clients might search for when they're looking for your service on Google. So for me that might be nails, cuticles or polish. So I'll add my description right here. Then for your image you can search for WIX Media Gallery, but it's always best to use your own high quality photos if you have them. I have my own picture, so I'll just add that here. If you've already added your business address in your site settings, that'll automatically show up here. And if it makes sense for your service, you can also host virtual sessions right from your dashboard. Now I'll add my duration and some buffer time between appointments. So I'll make this 45 minutes and add 15 minutes for my buffer time. Now let's talk pricing. We have a few options here. Fixed price that'll charge the same amount for everyone who books. No fee, which means you won't display or charge any fees on your site. Varied prices which lets you set a few rates for each service, like a discount for kids or an upcharge for VIP bookings. And last but not least, custom pricing which lets you set a range for what you're charged. For now I'll keep these fixed at $45 and then I'll choose whether I want to get paid online in person or either one. Or if I want my clients to pay a deposit ahead of time and the rest in person. I'll stick to entire amount online for now. For now we'll skip this memberships and packages section. We'll talk about all of your payment options in another lesson. Under availability, I'll pick which staff members will offer this service. So I'll uncheck this first staff member and now my clients won't be able to book them from this service. Then I can add a cover image and a gallery and change up any of these other settings, like whether I'll automatically accept bookings for this appointment or if I want my clients to fill out a form before they book. Now let's take a quick look at our overview at the top of this page and under display settings I'll make sure I'll add my new service to my site and app and then click Save. Let's say I offer more than just one on one appointments. With classes, I can offer one time sessions that can be booked by more than one client at a time. For my salon, that might be group manicures for a birthday party or event, or maybe a weekly workshop, we can add these classes the same way I added an appointment, either using a template or starting from scratch. Let's take a look at class I've already added to my site. Everything here is pretty much the same as an appointment, except a few key things down at the bottom of my service details I can set a maximum number of participants. Another important difference is how classes are scheduled. For appointments, clients can choose any available time on my staff members calendars, but for classes they'll only be able to join sessions at the set times that I put on my calendar. Basically, I determine exactly when, how long and how often I'll offer my classes. So under schedule, I choose to offer this class weekly with no end date. So it's routine part of my salon's weekly schedule. My clients will be able to see these sessions on my site and reserve their spot and down in my additional settings. I can allow groups to book under one reservation, which is great for hosting events. And a quick note, once a class fills up, you can let clients join a waitlist, but we'll look at that in another lesson. For classes where you want clients to meet more than once, like a month educational program or a 10 week training challenge, you can create one course with multiple sessions that your clients can book all at once. Let's check out the course I created for my site. Setting up a course really is almost identical to a class, since I'll choose exactly when I'll offer these sessions. But here I'll schedule all of my sessions for one course up front. I set this course to meet once a week for 13 weeks, all hosted by the same staff member. But I know this time might not work for every client. So I can add another group of sessions to my calendar. Here's how I do that first. First, I can choose who will be leading the course, or I can add a new staff member. Right from here, I'll just add myself here to show you how. And now I'll just set this to repeat weekly. And before we finish up, I can decide whether clients can join my course after the session meets. This could work for things like weekly fitness sessions, but for a course like mine that'll follow a structure or a curriculum. Let's leave this off. And now your clients can book your services without ever picking up the phone. So that's an overview on how clients can schedule their own sessions. Next, we'll talk about how you and your staff can manage your own schedules and availability. That's where we'll pick it up on our next lesson. Running a business can make you feel like you need to be in 10 places at once. But with an organized calendar, you can stay on top of everything, all from one place. In this lesson, we'll go through some ways to keep your schedule running smoothly. Using your WIX booking calendar, we'll talk about how to manage your schedule, your team schedules, and your staff profiles. Then we'll look at how your team can manage their own calendars, even from their phones. Let's check it out. Let's get started by opening up my dashboard and heading over to my WIX booking calendar. Here I can see my entire staff's availability at a glance and and I can click add sessions to manually book clients and to block off time on my schedule. I can even filter to change how I see my schedule by service or staff member and color code my view as well. So let's filter by service. So if I deselect this, I won't be able to see it on my calendar anymore, but I can click it again to bring it right back in. The same way we can filter by staff member to remove anyone from my calendar too. And I can just reset my filters if I want to see everything back again onto color coding. Now if I care more about keeping track of which services have booked instead of who they're booked with, I can color code by services instead of staff members. You can also filter by locations, session availability, block time, or personal calendar events. I can sync my personal calendar up here so I can make sure I don't double book myself or forget an appointment and I can just click sync to set that up. Once I do, my booking calendar will automatically add block time during any events on my sync calendar and show my clients that I'm busy without giving them any details. Now I need to get my staff set up. I can click on staff under my booking calendar to edit each person's profile and regular working hours. And another note here, don't overlook your staff profiles. Giving each person a profile with a headshot and a friendly bio helps build trust with your clients. So let's look at one of my staff member profiles. I've added a name, description, email and a profile photo and this is where I would be able to set up their regular availability. And I can change which days and times this person will work each week. Once I get each of my staff members set up with a profile like this, here's what my clients will see on this site. Now they can learn a bit about my staff and their specialties. Before booking. I want my staff to be able to manage their own booking calendars. Here's how they'll do it. Back in my dashboard I'll click on give Calendar Access. I'll just confirm their email address and once they accept the invite, they'll be able to view and add their own bookings right on the calendar without seeing any of the other backend tools that I have access to as a site owner. This is great for me as a manager because now my staff members can handle tasks like marking sessions as paid, managing attendance for their classes, emailing their clients directly and managing their time off And I can focus on other parts of running my business. My team and I can also manually add appointments to the calendar on clients behalf. Now you might be thinking, are my clients the ones who should book the appointments online? Well yes, but this will come in handy if you also take appointments over the phone or in person. So let's go through it. In my booking calendar I'll just click add a new appointment and I'll just add myself as a client. And let's get this one in the books. You can also add block time here so you and your staff could keep track of your time off or any changes to your usual availability. I'll just give this a title, make sure I have the right date and time as well. And I can also add a quick note that only I'll be able to see. Your blog. Time will have this striped background on the calendar so you can spot it easily. Clients will automatically see that this staff member is unavailable during that time without sharing any of the details that you added. But for days like holidays where a bunch of staff members will need the same time time blocked, you don't need to do this over and over for everyone. The Bookings Business Availability app is a huge time saver. You can add it to your site from the WIX app market. So if I open up the app market here on the left, I should be able to do a quick search and I'll see the app here. I've already added it to my site. So let's say I'm closing my salon for a day. So I'll just open up the app and then I can pick which staff members will be off. In my case it'll be everyone. Then the dates will be closed. So now when I go back to my calendar, I'll see everyone's time blocked off. It's just as simple to manually add extra classes and course sessions to my schedule. Let's quickly go through both. Starting with a class, I'll click to add a new session and fill in my details here. If I'm adding a one time class, that won't be part of my routine schedule. I won't set it to repeat. Now my clients will be able to sign up for this class session on my site or I can manually book them right here in the calendar. So I'll add myself as a participant. To show you how, I'll just click on that class, click Manage and add myself right here. And I'll do the exact same. To add a course session here I'll click add and pick course Then choose all of these settings and make sure to click Save. You may not need to schedule courses like this often, since they're typically recurring, but this can be helpful for scheduling things like makeup or trial sessions. Before we wrap up, I've got some good news. Just about everything we covered in this lesson can also be done right from your phone from the Wix Owner app. Using the Owner app lets you and your staff manage your schedules from anywhere. You can download it right from your favorite app store on your phone. Then all you have to do is follow the instructions to sync up with with your site. Here's what it looks like once you've set it all up. Now you and your staff can book appointments, manage your schedules, update your availability, and chat with clients in real time, all from your phones. And now that you know how to schedule your services, you can customize your booking process even more. That's what we'll cover in our next lesson. When it comes to building your booking process, one size definitely doesn't fit all. So this lesson is all about creating a flow that's right for your business. We'll look at some ways you can customize your booking process with some custom forms and waitlists, and by letting clients book from their phones or through Google. Let's get started. One way to customize your process is by adding a booking form. This helps you get all the info you need from a client before their session, saving both of you time on the day of the service. That being said, try to keep forms short so so you don't put too many steps in the way of a client getting on the books. Let's jump into my dashboard. So under my booking services, I'll click one of my appointments and scroll down to the very bottom on my additional settings. First, we'll see a default form here, which is where clients will share basic info like their name and email address before booking a service. But I can also ask them specific questions with a custom form, so let's edit mine together. I'll just give this a title and a subtitle and then I can customize the things I want my clients to fill out. We already have some basics here like name and email, and you'll see there's no asterisk next to phone number, which means it isn't required. But I'm going to go ahead and make this a required field so I can send text reminders for my appointments. Then here at the bottom I can customize this, add your message field or change it to a short answer or checkbox so let's change its name and I could add another field here if I want to collect a bit more info. Let's say I need to ask a few questions to figure out how long their sessions will take. I'll just add another field and make it a short answer and then I'll make sure to add my question again. The rule of thumb here is to only ask questions you'll need answered before an appointment. This is also a good spot to make sure clients are aware of any terms or conditions they'll need to agree to, like a cancellation or a refund policy. To add that, you just add another custom field, make it a checkbox, and link it to your policies page on your site. Before I wrap up, I just want to make sure I add this as a required field. Once this has everything I need, I can just click Save the majority of people booking services online are doing it on their cell phones. So to meet clients where they are, you can use two wix apps designed to make mobile books. The first is the Wix Owner app. This one works on your side. It's where you manage all of your bookings. The second is the WIX Spaces app. This one is for your clients. It's where they can go to book your services on a mobile. Both apps are available right in the App Store on your phone or tablet, and you can set them up to work together seamlessly. We looked at the wix Owner app in our last lesson, so so now let's take a look at the Spaces app. This is my online space for my nails.