Guide to Baphomart Bookings
Baphomart Booking is available for members of the Baphomart Plus plan, to upgrade your account please visit the Baphomart Plan tab in the sellers dashboard.
To start with the Baphomart Booking, you need to understand what a booking is and what a block is:
Understanding bookings and blocks
Bookings
Most booking products are unlike regular products, as they products are time dependent, subject to maintenance and usually do not have any shipping.
Blocks
A block is the minimum unit of your booking product which you are making available for booking.
Three things you need to remember about a block:
- Max bookings per block: This field allows you to book the product multiple times within the available time frame
- Minimum booking window: It is the minimum duration of time during which a customer will have to book your next available product
- Maximum booking window: The maximum range of available bookings for the product from the next available date.
Say, if you have a beach resort, most of your customers wouldn’t want to pay for the entire day, because they only spend the evening there. So, to cater to such customers, you can easily create blocks. When you create a block for 3 hours with a buffer time of 30 minutes, you can sell it as many times you want. Setting a buffer time will allow you to give some time to your staff to refresh and redecorate the room for your next customer.
How do I create an item that can be booked?
Click on Add new product, a form similar to the new product form will appear with a different looking section below the basics. We will break each section down for your easy understanding. This might get a little complicated so please read through carefully. Booking is a very much customizable product with a high level of relations.
This is the very basic section. See easy so far! Ok let’s go deeper.
Create bookings with precise calendar accuracy
You can make your booking product available for several days only. You can also set days when the product will be published, but locked before the booking period actually starts.
For the following articles we are going to use a hotel as an example, but this process is effectively the same for events, talks, workshops, etc.
So, you are a hotel manager and you have 3 luxury suites which you are posting online. However the holiday season starts in 3 days. So, you can easily post a booking product, with a three day no booking period and say, a one week booking time.
Fix the range for your booking availability according to days months hours or minutes and many other ways. You can add and reorganize priority by dragging too.
Sometimes, you can also sell your bookable products in volumes when you are targeting big bookings. For example, you don’t want to book your room unless someone takes it for two days. That’s also possible.
What’s Calendar display mode?
The calendar on the product page displays availability. This field can be toggled on/off for the customer as a clickable button.
This is where the things start to get a little complicated. This section deals with the availability in four different ways – frequency, capacity, range and time.
What is minimum and maximum booking window?
The minimum booking window is the minimum duration of time during which a customer will have to book your next available product. For example, your next available product is on 17th of this month, but you want at least 2 days before that day to allow for booking.
The maximum range of available booking for the product from the next available date. So, if your next available booking for your product is on 17th this month and the maximum booking window is 7 days, then on the product page a customer will be shown booking availability up to 24th.
Here is an example on a calendar how these dates will work.
What is Booking Duration?
This field allows you to define a duration of your product. The duration of each product your customers will be buying. Suppose you own a hotel and don’t want to rent your best room unless someone wants it for three days. So you put three days as your block duration. But when you are creating bookings for your regular rooms, you are putting one day.
What is maximum bookings per block?
This field allows you to book the product multiple times within the available time frame. Say, I have 2 of the Luxury suites and I want to rent them both. So, with this single bookable product I can manage both.
What is a buffer period?
You may need some time to refresh your asset / product after completion of each order / service.
If you have multiple booking blocks allocated in a single day, you will need some time in between to do some maintenance. This is what buffer time is. Say, if you want to clean up your Luxury Suite and change the towels before you hand it over to the next customer, you may set a buffer time of 30 hours. Leave it on 0 for no delay.
The unit for buffer period changes automatically with your block unit duration.
Adding Resources
You can chose to add additional resources to your product, for example, on my luxury suite, I have added a resource if they want to use a home cinema system for viewing movies to be set up.
Go to Dashboard → Bookings → Click on Manage Resources
Now, click on Add New Resource to create a new resource. Click on Edit / Remove for changing a resource properties.
These resources can be set to automatically assigned or customer selected. As you see, you can charge for your resources as both initiation costs and for the length they use it.
1. Enter the resource cost.
2. Select the resource from the drop down menu.
Resources can also have their ranges depending on various attributes. You can set them from a different menu.
Making bookable products cost-effective
We understand that charging for bookable products can be difficult and people have so many kinds of booking requests that it gets hard for you to charge and make a profit. That is why Baphomart Booking allows you to set base costs, block costs and display costs all separately and chargeable and multipliable according to order.
There is always a base cost of the product, block costs are based on order volume and display cost is something which you can display initially as the lowest limit perhaps. If you leave it empty, the cost will become adaptive as the customer modifies his order. So, you can also use the display cost as a minimum cost per order in that sense.
Say, if you set a base cost of £100 for your booking, and you have a block of 2 hours, then you can charge the customers for each block separately and yet get paid for the initial booking.
Each field is tagged with a (?) hint text which explains each field.
Adding an audience type to your product
Sometimes your bookable products can be age sensitive or you might even have separate arrangements for different aged customers. You should check this option if your product can be booked according to several person groups.
As you can see, you can also set seat limit and cost depending on person group.
Customer Booking Options
After selecting a product or service that can be booked from your Baphomart shop, the customer has to perform following actions:
Choosing from the options
Your customer will get the options you have set at the time of creating the product or service. They have to choose between minimum and maximum amount of person and also the types of resources that you have created.
Ordering
After selecting a number of person and type of resource (if required), they have to select the available date of booking. They have to click on Choose button to view the calendar and select the suitable date.
If the date is available, the Check Availability button will become active. Then they have to click on the button and it will redirect them to order page.
Now, the customer should provide necessary information for ordering the product or service. After filling the order form, they have to click on the Request Confirmation button and this will create a new order.
Cancelling
A customer can cancel the order by navigating to My Accounts → Orders and click on the cancel button.
