How to Create an Online Booking System for your App or Site

Those who decide that they want to digitize their booking processes often integrate booking management tools into an existing mobile or web platform.

And it’s quite reasonable since online booking options can get you more clients — 70% of respondents say they prefer an online booking option to a regular one. Besides, it can help you get an advantage to stay ahead of the competition as 31% of clients would choose a new service provider that offers online booking.

So, if you want to implement a custom online booking functionality or simply want to learn more about it — welcome!

✅ How Custom Online Booking Integration Can Help your Business

An online booking option can help businesses improve their workflow in many ways. First and foremost, it automates routine processes that otherwise take lots of time and effort from your side.

However, let’s take a look at how your business can benefit from integrating online booking into your app or website.

# 1: Booking & Its Management Automation 🎫

Although many businesses use pre-packaged solutions for integrating booking functionality like Square Appointments, Acuity Scheduling, Checkfront & others, there are several reasons why they might need to develop a custom one.

One of the main reasons is that their current solution (a website, an app, CRM, ERP, etc.) may not allow integration with such ready-to-use softwares.

But what if a person forgets to book an appointment and wants to do it at midnight? We don’t know that many businesses that offer all hours phone booking service, do you?

With online booking software, it’s not a big deal since it allows users’ to schedule appointments at any time & place.

❓ The Difference Between On-Demand & In-Advance Booking Services

Before we start talking about features and functionality, we’d like to mention that there are 2 types of online booking services — on-demand & in-advance.

Depending on the type of your business, your booking system will have special features.

Why don’t we briefly recall the difference between these 2 types?

However, this is really only relevant for typical use cases. It is possible that your on-demand service is more likely to be used from a website rather than an app.

Our intention here is to simply indicate that you should think about who, where, and how will use your service.

🚌 Our Expertise: CheckMyBus

We at Stormotion happened to work with an in-advance booking service CheckMyBus, and we developed a mobile app for them that perfectly matches their business needs.

⚙️ Top Features of an Online Appointment Scheduling Tool

In this section, we’ll provide you with a list of features to build user-friendly booking functionality.

However, we’d like to point out once again that “online booking” can be used for many types of businesses, which may & most likely will impact the functionality you’ll need.

We tried to keep the features universal, so they match most business types.

# 1: Booking & Calendar 📅

Technically, this feature is what this is all about. It can consist of several parts:

• A bar to choose a service (in case, it wasn’t chosen earlier).
• Service description.
• Date & time.
• “Book”/“Schedule” button.
• A window to leave comments in.
• A chat with a support specialist.

Don’t forget to ask users for permission before turning notifications on.

# 5: Customer Support 🤖

So that the user experience isn’t spoiled by easy-to-solve troubles, you should provide a great support service.

Perfect customer support should provide:

• A chatbot that’s able to solve simple troubles & transfer users to real specialists if needed.
• A live chat with support specialists.
• A couple of FAQs with a wide range of questions.
• A 24/7 phone support for emergencies.
• A list of contacts with phone numbers for different operators, an email address, Social Media links, links to messengers like WhatsApp, Telegram, etc.

📊 Admin Panel for an Online Booking App

To manage the booking software itself, you’ll need an admin panel.

Through the software, the workflow members could manage it or access any needed information.

Staff Management 😀

Initially, online booking was created to reduce the workload of staff members. So naturally, the software can include several features for managing workers to achieve the initial goal of regulating the workload.

One of the most useful features in terms of managing appointments is an in-built calendar.

There, all booking can be shown & automatically sorted by these categories:

• Booked/Scheduled.
• Pending.
• Canceled.
• Rescheduled
• Completed & others.

Within this tool, you can also track employees’ workflow, see when they’re available, and manage it.

What’s important is to allow managers to manually add new appointments to the software, since having the option of online booking doesn’t guarantee that no one will use phone reservation anymore.

Besides, malfunctions can still happen and lead to bookings with the wrong time/date/name, etc. So, to fix such consequences, managers might need to do some manual work.

✈️ Tech Stack for Online Booking

To modify your custom booking system with more tools, you can consider adding multiple integrations and APIs.

• To integrate a calendar, you can use Google Calendar, Nylas, Zoho, etc.
• For payments integration, take a look at Braintree or Stripe. Actually, we have a whole article dedicated to integrating payment systems if you’d like to learn more about it.
• You can integrate an HCM system by using Oracle Cloud HCM, Workday, etc.
• For collection feedback, you could use Twilio, Lumoa, and others.
• Push-notification can be enabled by using such APIs as OneSignal, Pusher, etc.
• For desktop notifications, you could use Sendpulse, iZooto, etc. Some of these 4 notification APIs enable mobile as well as web (desktop) notifications.

If you want to get some visual information on how an API works, you can watch this explanatory video:

💡 Takeaways

As we can see, online booking is something rather necessary to stay competitive on the market since many clients would choose a provider who has online booking opportunities.

Besides, the benefits that you can get from implementing it outweigh the costs.

Why don’t when briefly summarize what steps you should take to implement booking tools into your app or website:

• Choose whether you’ll use a mobile or web platform for integrating a scheduling tool in case you have both.
• Decide on what features you’ll add to the software.
• Structure your future admin panel functionality.
• Review some APIs to decide whether you need additional integrations or not.
• Find a Tech Partner and start the development.

If you need any help with the development or have some questions on how to create an online booking system left, or want to clarify any details, feel free to reach out to us. We’ll find a way to help you!