An online salon booking system is something that gives salon owners a sense of relief to manage their day’s or week’s schedule without getting overwhelmed.
If you’re looking for a salon booking system that can help you book clients’ beauty sessions throughout a week or month, then in this post, we’re going to look at the Date and Time Picker plugin that can help you easily set up the salon online appointment system in no time.
We’ll also cover all the great features it provides to the users and see how best you can use them.
What is an Online Salon Booking System?
An online salon booking system enables a beauty salon owner to add different fields on the site that would allow customers to enquire availability time in a spa or salon and book their sessions conveniently.
The booking system display customers date and time on which they can book their appointment, and once they have booked, the owner can extract that data to a 3rd party offline/online software and, according to that, manage their working schedule.
In addition to these, the online salon booking system allows the salon owner to create different services package with a different staff member.
It further helps the customer to book a session based on those packages and pay in advance. Thus, it helps the owner create a booked session more serious and gives energy to a motivated schedule.
Benefits of Online Salon Booking System
Well the essential benefits an online salon booking system can provide a customer and owner are —
- It saves time, and you don’t need to pick up calls while treating your customers. Once someone booked a session, you can directly refer to that online.
- With time it will save you money because you’ll have to put fewer resources into work to manage clients’ bookings—for example, fewer calls and receipt or paper memos.
- A seamless and convenient way for customers to book beauty sessions without putting in extra efforts. No need to call and ask when services are available and how much it’d cost them. Whatever their queries would be, everything they can find on the online booking system for beauty salons or spas.
- A better flow of income even before providing any service from pre-bookings in heavy seasons. Such as valentines, new years eve, and more.
If we get inside it, we’d find more crucial benefits of using a booking system for the salon.
And if you haven’t got one, then it’s the right time that you should, as demand for an on-demand salon, hair care and beauty industry has seen reasonable growth in the past couple of years. And having a booking system on your website can provide more benefits than the mentioned above.
How Can Date and Time Picker Play a Role in an Online Salon Booking System?
If you’re looking to add an online booking system for your salon that also allows customers to add custom messages to their bookings.
Or for an on-demand salon service provider, customers can type in the address where they live with additional details, and you can send one of your staff members to attend and fulfil the requirements.
Then with the help of Date and Time Picker, you can easily accomplish that.
Date and Time Picker is a free WordPress plugin that provides you with the option to convert input fields on a form into a date calendar and time picker.
So, users can book their beauty sessions as well as raise query regarding it or send suggestions on how they’ll want their sessions to be gone.
On the other hand, you can reply to customers questions that instil a better relationship between the two parties, plus get ready according to the client’s requirement, which in result set a successful session and later good mouth publicity.
That’s not all (converting input fields into a date or time range picker) the Date and Time Picker plugin can do for a WordPress booking system for your salon. There’s more in it, and we’re going to look at each functionality it provides to turn a simple booking form into a highly functional one.
Let’s check out what are its highly functional features.
Features of the Date and Time Picker Plugin for an Online Salon Booking System
The following features of the Date and Time Picker plugin would help you create a highly funcational booking system —
(1) CSS Selectors to Convert Fields
By using a contact form creator, you would be able to add a booking system for WordPress.
However, it won’t allow users to select a date and time for their beauty session in your salon. But with the help of CSS Selectors available in the Date and Time Picker plugin, you could easily convert the fields into a date calendar and time picker.
And to do that, all you have to do is, create a new date or time, or both date and time picker field.
In the CSS Selector section, give it a custom CSS name, and then assign that name to the input field of the contact form you want to convert.
(2) Custom Post Type Support for the Date and Time Picker Fields
The custom post type support available with the pro version of Date and Time Picker allows you to create and manage multiple fields separately.
So, you can easily create different booking forms for your different services with separate fields and a set of rules.
(3) Display Dates Available to Book After ‘n’ Number of Days From Current Date
If in case you don’t want your customers to book a beauty session today or for the next couple of days.
Or by default you want to provide users dates available to book after a certain number of days, then using the Minimum Date feature, it’s easy to achieve.
In the minimum date section, you need to enter the number of days to which you want to advanced the available dates. For example, you want to shift the available date 10 days ahead.
What you need to do is, enter ‘+10 days’ in the minimum date section. The date and time picker of your online salon booking system will display dates the same as the following illustration.
(4) Set Days Limit in Which a User Can Book the Session
Want to provide users a date slot or window from current date to some number of dates in the future?
Then using the Maximum Date feature, you can do that effectively to your WordPress booking system for salon.
If today is 10th October, and you want to provide a date slot of 10 days, then with the help of the maximum date, you’ll add a date slot that would allow customers to book a session only between 10th October to 20th October.
As you can see in the above screenshot, the online salon booking system only shows dates to book between the specified date windows.
(5) Disable Week Days & Specific Dates
Holidays or weekends, if your online salon booking system isn’t going to accept appointments on some specific days or dates, then Disable Week Days and Disable Specific Dates option could be useful for you.
Simply enter the dates and tick the checkbox next to the weekdays’ name; you don’t want to receive any bookings.
(6) Set Day Start & Day End Time
Users can trick an on-demand beauty salon service provider by entering vague times. And not just the on-demand, but they can also do the same to an offline salon.
Deliberately book a session at an unusual time, and if you’re not able to provide the service, then ruckus for return and free service.
But you can prevent your online salon booking system by these kinds of behaviour with the help of the Minimum Time and Maximum Time feature by creating a definite time slot during which you’re able to provide a particular beauty service — not a minute before or not a minute after.
(7) Create Online Salon Booking System With Date Range Fields
For some customers, a day’s long beauty parlour therapy isn’t enough, and they might need regular beauty therapies for multiple days or in the entire week.
In this case, you may require a date range field that would help your customers select multiple subsequent days.
The pro version of Date and Time Picker comes with a feature to fulfil this exact requirement.
The Date Range option allows you to create a date range field that would be connected to another field.
One field would behave as ‘From Date Field’ and the newly created field would act like ‘To Date Field,’ for the online salon booking system the same as the below illustration.
In the From Date field, they select the day when they want to start the session. And in the To Date field, they’ll select the day on which they’d stop getting treatments.
(8) Change Fields Theme
According to modern website design trends, dark mode is taking over the internet world.
And if you’re thinking of creating an online salon booking system that would look great in the dark, then the Date and Time Picker plugin have got the option to keep your booking form accompanied with the notion.
(9) Limit Users to Edit Date & Time Fields Using Keyboard
Sometimes users try to act smart.
Even if you have provided them with a definite time and date frame, they try to edit it.
But with the help of Prevent Keyboard Edits option, you can prohibit such acts for both safety and security reasons.
Thus, no later confusion or arguments between the customer and manager or seller or you.
(10) Add Online Salon Booking System For Multiple Languages
English, by far the most widely used language on the internet.
However, if you want to keep your WordPress booking system for salon in the native language.
The Date and Time Picker plugin supports more than 40 languages, that might contain your native voice as well.
You can easily select your particular choice of language by going to the Language section of the plugin while creating a Date or Time picker field.
More Features to Come 🎉
These were some of the best features that the Date and Time Picker plugin offer for an online salon booking system.
And if you get it, you’ll find more. Furthermore, future updates to this plugin would add more powerful features that would allow you to create a highly efficient and functional booking system for the salon.
The future updates might include features such as —
- Integration to Google and Outlook Calendar.
- Support to more contact forms plugins.
- Enhanced style options.
- Automated Contact Form 7 integration.
If you’ve used the Date and Time Picker plugin already, let us know what was your experience using it.
Or get the Pro Version of the Date and Time Picker plugin to add more powerful features to your online salon booking system.
