Many times, businesses like hotel bookings, tour bookings, or rental businesses wish to control the confirmation or cancellation of bookings, especially before the customer’s payment.

In such cases, they manually cancel the bookings by emailing or calling the customers. They also have to refund the amount that the customers already paid while booking.

To eliminate this hassle, a feature in our Booking & Appointment Plugin for Woocommerce can be enabled, in which bookings need the admin’s confirmation before the payment is taken from the customers.

Here’s how to set up a WooCommerce bookable product that requires admin confirmation before payment.

1. Booking Requires Confirmation

2. Approving or Rejecting pending bookings

3. Automatically cancel bookings that require confirmation

1. Booking Requires Confirmation

a) Admin Experience

Let’s take an example of Recurring Weekdays booking to understand this setting.

Suppose you want to rent out Banquet Halls. From the Products> Add Products link, create a product called Balaji Banquet Hall.

This hall can be rented for any day; hence, we need to select the Booking Type as Single Day, as shown below:

Selecting the Booking type as Only Day -> Single Day

You wish to approve or confirm the booking before the customer pays for it.

In such a scenario, you will have to enable the Requires Confirmation setting by toggling on the button next to it.

Enabling the setting Requires Confirmation?

Make sure to click the Save Settings button.

Next, enable all the Bookable Weekdays by going to the Availability Tab.

Set Maximum bookings to 1 since only one hall is available for rent.

Click on the Save Changes button to save the settings.

Enabling bookable weekdays and maximum bookings

Once you have completed all these steps, your banquet hall is ready to be booked for rent.

b) User Experience

This is how your Balaji Banquet Hall appears on the front end when customers visit your website to book.

The product displayed on the frontend

Let’s say the customer books the banquet hall for 28th December 2017. The Book Now! button will be replaced by the Check Availability button. This is because the setting Requires Confirmation is enabled.

Booking date selected and Check Availability button enabled

When the customer clicks on the Check Availability button, the order gets added to the cart.

Booking details displayed on the Cart page

By clicking the Proceed to Checkout button, the customer will be taken to the Checkout page, where instead of Payment Mode, the Check Booking Availability option will be displayed.

Instead of the Place Order button, the Request Confirmation button will be displayed:

Your Order section on the Checkout page

As soon as the customer clicks on the Request Confirmation button, the order will be placed but not confirmed. Hence, it will show the Order Received page as shown below:

Order Details page showing Booking details

As a result, the Order Status will be shown as Pending payment on the WooCommerce > Order page as shown below:

Order status is shown as Pending Payment on the Orders page

Since the order is placed but needs your approval, an email notification will be sent to you informing you about it.

The following New Booking email will be sent to the admin:

New Booking email notification sent to admin

You can then approve/cancel the booking using the Edit Booking link in the WooCommerce > Edit Order page.

A pending confirmation email will be sent to the customer for the booking, which requires the store owner’s confirmation.

This email is to inform the customer that their booking has been received and is pending approval by the shop owner.

As soon as the store owner approves the booking, the customer will get the booking confirmation email.

The Booking Confirmation Pending email, as shown below, will be sent to the customer.

Booking Confirmation Pending email notification sent to the customer

2. Approving or Rejecting pending bookings

Here’s how to approve or confirm an existing booking that was placed for the same product on 28th December 2017.

Go to that booking’s Edit Booking link. A new page to Edit Booking will open with all booking details, as shown below.

Booking Status changed to Confirmed

Approve the booking by changing the Booking Status from Pending Confirmation to Confirmed.

After you click on the Save Booking button, an email confirmation is sent to the customer stating that the booking is confirmed along with the Pay Link, as shown below:

Booking confirmation email sent to the customer

At the same time, the Pay button is also displayed on the My Account page for the given order.

The customer can then make the payment using any of the payment options.

Pay button available on the My Account page

After the customer has made their payment, the order status is automatically updated according to the payment gateway selected by the customer.

Let’s assume that, for some reason, you want to reject this booking.

Change the Booking status to Cancelled on the Edit Booking page as shown below:

Edit Booking page where Booking status is changed to Cancelled

When you cancel the booking, an email is sent to the customer informing him that the booking has been cancelled, as shown below:

Email notification after the booking is cancelled

3. Automatically cancel bookings that require confirmation

This setting lets you automatically cancel the confirmation of pending bookings after a certain time has passed.

If the admin has not confirmed it, this setting will ensure that the booking is cancelled after a specific number of hours.

Note: This setting is only for bookable products that require confirmation from the Admin. This means that the setting ‘Requires Confirmation’ should be enabled for the product. You will find this by going to the Product Page > Booking Metabox > General tab > Requires Confirmation as shown here:

After this, go to Booking & Appointment > Settings > Global > Booking Settings dropdown as shown below:

Find the ‘Automatically cancel bookings that require confirmation’ setting.

For instance, if you wish to cancel a booking after 1 hour of it being placed and the admin not being able to approve, then you will enter the value 1 in the field for this setting:

Click on ‘Save Settings’ and you’re done!

For the frontend experience, let’s say a customer has booked a Guitar lesson. Here’s how the Order Details Page will look after the order has been placed:

Since the order requires confirmation from the admin, the payment method will appear as ‘Check Booking Availability’.

Once it is confirmed, the customer can pay for the booking. Till then, for the customer, the booking would appear as ‘Pending-confirmation’

They will be able to view the status of the booking by going to My Account > Bookings as shown here:

Let’s assume that one hour has passed since the order was placed, and the admin has not yet confirmed the booking.

In such a case, the order would be cancelled. The customer will able to see booking status as ‘Cancelled’ in their Account Page:

The above example was for Recurring Weekdays; however, you can use it with Specific Dates or Multiple-Day booking types!

 

To conclude, the setting Requires Confirmation? of the Booking & Appointment Plugin for WooCommerce proves beneficial to Admins and their Customers! The admin is relieved from the burden of refunding the customers if the order is cancelled. Additionally, the customer has to make payment only after getting the order approval from the admin. There’s no need to wait or request a follow-up for a refund from the admin if the order gets cancelled!