How to Set up Appointment Scheduling for Your website

Adding online appointment scheduling options for your business can allow prospective customers to quickly book your services through your website and pay for them, even when you are not available online. Whether you have a small business or you are rapidly expanding, automating the entire scheduling process can help save time which you can then use to focus on your core business responsibilities. 

Setting up appointment scheduling right on your website helps you capture all the prospective leads right on your website, leading to increased conversions and higher engagement. 

In this article, we will discuss everything you need to know about setting up appointment scheduling for your website:

The benefits of adding appointment scheduling on the website

Booking appointments online saves customers time and allows them to access your services more efficiently. You can set up a booking schedule based on your availability, allowing customers to even book any last-minute appointments, in case your schedule opens up. 

But online appointment booking isn’t just a single straightforward feature, it’s a multi-layer solution that can help you with:

• Attracting new customers and retaining the old ones
• Streamlining customer management leading to more satisfied customers 
• Booking appointments with minimum room for error
• Generating insights from the booking reports to make better data-driven decisions 
  

Automating appointment scheduling through third-party applications helps in managing all of these complex functionalities above automatically, allowing you to make better end-customer experience.

The steps to set up appointment scheduling for your website:

There are two ways that you can do that, including:

1- Direct customers to an appointment booking website

You can provide the online booking option for your website by directing your leads to an external booking agent. This method requires you to either send the booking link directly to your customers or hyperlink it to your website. Of course you would have to pay for using the booking system and their payment gateway. 

Here are some of the drawbacks of using this method:

• Some booking systems may directly take a small percentage of your profits
• If you already have a website with a payment gateway on it, you would be paying for two payment gateways. 
• You would essentially be sending your website’s traffic to a whole other location. It is very much possible for customers to lose interest in booking your services when they land on a different website. T
• Customers may not trust the external booking tool to share their payment details or they may even find your competitors listed on the website.
• The external booking website may have branding of its own, all of which can disrupt the customer experience and be incredibly bad for business
  

2- Embed an appointment scheduling tool on your website

A better way to set up bookings online is by embedding an appointment scheduling tool right into your website to offer your customers a seamless booking experience. You can use an appointment booking tool as a plugin, API, or third-party application that directly integrates with your website to make appointments easier and more streamlined for your customers.  

Since almost all appointment booking tools that embed on the website only help with the booking process, you will have to integrate a payment gateway separately in order to get paid for your bookings which can be rather time-consuming and even require you to hire a website developer. 

A faster way would be to set up or migrate your website to Shopify which already has website templates and third-party applications that make creating and managing a website as easy as clicking a few buttons. You can then use an appointment booking tool like Appointo to embed appointment booking on your website directly. 

Appointo makes online appointment bookings easier for your business by offering full customization, high flexibility, and seamless calendar integration with Google Calendar as well as Calendly. 

Here are some of the many features that Appointo offers:

Managing, editing, and canceling appointments: You can manually edit, reschedule, and even cancel appointments while mentioning the reasons for the same to your customers. The integration with Google Calendar and Calendly means your schedule is always up to date and you will never end up missing an appointment or overbooking.

Customized booking schedules: You can set your availability for every day of the week separately in order to ensure you are always present for your bookings. It's also possible to set up buffer time between each appointment, block off certain dates, and override dates.

‍Add upsells for your services: You can add your services as products on your Shopify website and then add upsells to them as ‘product variants’ in order to improve your revenue and provide customers with upsells that align with the service bookings that they are interested in. 

Give access to team members: You can add more of your team members to your Appointo account in order to get help in managing your online bookings. This in turn ensures your account’s security and puts all the permission controls with you. 

No-code solution: Appointo is a no-code solution which means you can set it up entirely in 2 minutes or less without the need for any coding at all. You don’t need any developer’s help to set up your Appointo account and start taking up bookings. The tool offers a seamless and easy-to-understand interface for you to set up and manage online bookings. 

Final words

There is nothing to lose and a whole lot to gain by incorporating appointment scheduling on your website. When your customers have the ability to directly schedule service bookings and appointments, even at times you aren’t available online, it can bring in more business through your doors. Of course, a lot of it depends on the kind of appointment booking tool that you use.

Appointo is an end-to-end appointment scheduling app that you can directly integrate on your Shopify website. Take a look at it and get started on Appointo today!