The Appointment Form
After setting up your appointable product, appointment form is generated for the front-end, based on your product configuration. Here is an example for an Acupuncture appointment booking. Remaining time slots are listed:
If some of the time slots in a given day have been booked, a gray line on that day denotes that it is partially scheduled. Longer the line, more occupied the time slots on that day are. If you don’t want the partially booked gray line, it’s possible to hide this using CSS.
As options are chosen, the cost is updated dynamically – and once a valid appointment slot is selected, the “Book Now” button can be pressed to add the appointment to the cart. Appointment has an In Cart status that freezes the slot when added to the cart for 1 hour.
The checkout process
Appointment data is shown in the line item once in the cart, before being transferred to an appointment object after checkout.
If the appointment requires approval, payment is not taken during the checkout. This creates the appointment and the order, but requires payment after the appointment is confirmed.
Later, after you approve the appointment, the customer is emailed an Appointment Confirmed email as described in the Email Notifications section below. Alternately, the customer can log into their My Account page and make a payment there.
Appointments do not require a payment to behave like any other product in your store.
Email Notifications
Appointments have five email alerts that are handled for you automatically. You can edit all emails sent to customers and staff at: WooCommerce > Settings > Emails. They are:
- Admin New Appointment: New appointment emails are sent to the admin when a new appointment is created.
- Admin Appointment Cancelled: Cancellation emails are sent to the admin, when the status of an appointment goes to cancelled.
- Appointment Confirmed: Confirmation emails are sent to the customer when the status of an appointment goes to confirmed.
- Appointment Reminder: Reminder emails are sent to the customer to remind them of an upcoming appointment.
- Appointment Cancelled: Cancellation emails are sent to the customer, when the status of an appointment goes to cancelled.
- Appointment Follow-up: Follow-up emails are sent to the customer, after the appointment is completed.