2.4Cart configuration

TeamBooking has the ability to allow your customers to select multiple slots (even for different services) and to complete the booking process in a single operation. It's basically a Cart. Activating the Cart will change a little bit the frontend workflow (e.g. the reservations will grouped into orders etc.).

So if you want to activate this feature then please read carefully this paragraph. If you don't need this feature, then please skip this paragraph.

2.4.1Activating the Cart

In order to activate the Cart feature, go into the Core settings tab, locate the Allow multiple slots selection setting and set it to yes. Remember to save the settings.

If you have some availabilities already, you will see that the frontend slots list is changed. Now each slot presents two buttons: a Select button which adds the slot to the Cart and a Book now button which allows the customer to book that slot directly (in this case the booking workflow will be the same as the one with the Cart feature deactivated).

2.4.2Cart advanced settings

In the Core Settings tab there are two important settings to fine-tune the behavior of the slots that are added in the cart:

• Block slots in cart: if set to "yes", when a customer adds a slot in the Cart, that slot will be unavailable for booking by other customers. If set to "no", the slot will stay free until the customer proceeds with the checkout.
• Slots in cart expiration time: the expiration time (since the first slot addition) of the slots in the cart. After that time, if the checkout is not yet started, the slots will be removed from the Cart. If set to "Forever" the slots will remain in the cart as long as the session cookie is valid.

2.4.3Cart frontend workflow

When a slot is added to the Cart, a Cart menu will appear above the calendar, indicating how many slots are currently in the Cart. Click on the menu to see the Cart content and to checkout (Proceed with the booking).

When the customer decides to checkout, the reservation form will appear. The booking system will show one form per service, in order to collect the correct data.

For instance, if you have "Service A" and "Service B", each one with a different reservation form, and the customer goes to the checkout with let's say 3 slots for "Service A" and 2 slots for "Service B", the booking system will show the reservation form relative to "Service A" (one time) and then the reservation form relative to "Service B" (one time).

Once the data is collected, a summary step will be shown. Here the customer can perform further operations as selecting the number of tickets, adding a promo code, edit the reservation form data. Another important thing the customer can do here is about the slots relative to a service which has the payment set as "discretional": the customer can chose to pay now or later.

After the confirmation, according to the eventual payment settings and approval settings, an order id is generated and a confirmation message will be shown to the customer, with the results of the reservation process.

2.4.4Cart backend workflow

What happens in the backend when a multiple slots reservation is placed?

If the order contains, let's say, 5 reservations then you will see 5 new reservations in the Overview tab. If you open the details of those reservations you will see the order id to which they refers.

There is more: the Overview tab list can be sorted by orders rather than by reservations. By doing so, a list of orders will appear. For each order you can quickly check the customer, the total/paid amounts, the date. Opening the order details will show a list of the reservations in that order, which you can conveniently export in CSV or XLSX format.

2.4.5Configuring the e-mail messages for Cart orders

By default if an order contains, let's say, 5 reservations the booking system triggers all the necessary actions 5 times. If those 5 reservations are for the same service and the confirmation e-mail message to the customer is active in that service settings, then the customer will receive 5 confirmation e-mails which will be pretty much the same with the exception of the slot inherent data (date, time, service provider).

As this can be annoying, you can configure the plugin to "group" the e-mail messages by service and then send only one e-mail per service. To achieve this go into the Core settings tab and set Batch the e-mail messages per service after a multiple slots order to yes, then save the settings. The job is not finished, though: you need to configure the services e-mail messages properly as the booking system should know which parts of the e-mail template should be repeated for each slot (so that you can have a single e-mail which resumes all the slots booked for the same services).

To know how to configure the e-mail messages properly for the "batch" operations, please refer to the E-mail configuration part of the documentation, under the Services paragraph.

2.4.6Configuring the redirect URL

TeamBooking allows you to configure a redirect URL for each service. So if customer makes a reservation for a slot of a given service, they will be redirected to the specified redirect URL, if any.

What happens for multiple slot orders? How the redirect URL is managed in that case? Well, you can obviously configure the behaviour in the Core settings tab. The Redirect URL after a multiple slots order settings can be set to:

• No redirect. When a multiple slots order is placed, there will be no redirect, regardless of what the single service redirect settings are.
• Redirect to the service redirect URL if specified and only if all the slots in the order are of the same service, otherwise do not redirect. This is pretty much self-explanatory.
• Redirect to URL. You can specify a general redirect URL to which the customers will be redirected after a multiple slots order, regardless of what the single service redirect settings are.