Seasonal businesses like Lawn Care, Halloween Retailers, Snow Removal, etc., provide services only for a certain period throughout the year.
For example, snow removal businesses offer services only in the winter season, i.e., from November to January.
For your seasonal business services, the Booking & Appointment Plugin for WooCommerce’s Range type option is at your rescue!
A. Admin Experience
You run a Snow Removal Service company that offers snow plowing and removal services during the winter.
Create a product Classic Snow Removal Service from the Products > Add Products link.
On the same Products page, find the Booking Meta Box and click the Enable Booking option.
These settings can work with the Single Day and Multiple Nights booking types.
1. SINGLE DAY
Select the Booking Type as Single Day and click the Save Settings button.
Select Booking Type as Single Day
You provide your services from November to February.
Go to the Availability tab, and select your bookable days from the Weekday table as shown below:
Enable bookable weekdays and add maximum bookings
Here, Saturday and Sunday have been enabled.
All Saturdays and Sundays will be available for booking. The Maximum Bookings for these 2 days are set to 5. This means a maximum of 5 bookings can be taken each Saturday and Sunday.
Next, you need to select when the service will be available from the range of dates or months between November to February.
For this, enable the Set Availability by Dates/Months option and click the Add New button:
From the Range Type dropdown select the specific option.
You can use Fixed Range settings with Custom Range and Range of Months option.
You can add a Custom Range of 1st December 2017 to 15th December 2017 and 1st February 2018 to 15th February 2018.
Next, select Range of Months, select the month (January), and enable bookable as shown below:
Adding Ranges
Add the No. of years for which these dates will recur. It is added in the Max Bookings column which is set to 2.
The same date period would recur for the next 2 years. Click the Save Settings button once done.
Adding the Number of years
To summarize, you have set the product to take in bookings from:
- 1st December 2017 to 15th December 2017
- 1st February 2018 to 15th February 2018
- The entire month of January
The No. of years settings would be effective for 2 years.
All details added for Availability by Dates/Months
Now, on similar terms, let us see the setup for the Multiple Nights booking type.
1. Multiple Nights
For this select Multiple Nights under Booking Type as shown below:
Select Multiple Nights settings
Go to the Availability tab and add Maximum Bookings On Any Date option.
This setting refers to the maximum bookings for snow removal service on a single given day.
You can set it to 10 bookings as shown here:
Now select the bookable weekdays from the Weekday Table as shown below:
Adding details for weekdays and other settings
After completing all the above-mentioned steps, the Snow Removal Services is now available and the customers can book your services for the number of days as per their requirement within the date range set by you.
B. User Experience
This is how your Snow Removal Services will look when the customer visits your site:
Product display on the front end
The Select Date shows bookable dates as 2nd, 3rd, 9th, 10th December 2017:
Calendar showing the bookable dates for December 2017
It will also show 3rd, 4th, 10th, 11th February, 2018.
Calendar showing the bookable dates for February 2018
This is because the bookable days were set as only Saturdays and Sundays between 1st December to 15th December 2017 and 1st February to 15th February 2018.
Since the No. of years for these dates to recur was for 2 years, the same bookable dates will be shown on the calendar for December 2018 and February 2019 as shown below:
Calendar showing the bookable dates for December 2018
Calendar showing the bookable dates for February 2019
Additionally, the month of January was selected in the Range of Month option with bookable days as Saturdays and Sundays.
Thus, all the Saturdays and Sundays of January will be enabled for booking.
This will again be available for 2 years as No. of years was set to 2.
Hence all Saturdays and Sundays for the entire months of January 2018 and January 2019 will be enabled to accept bookings:
Calendar showing the bookable dates for January 2018
Calendar showing the bookable dates for January 2019
Thus the customers can book your service only between the added date/month range and as per year to recur in the booking settings.
Once the booking date is selected, the Add to Cart button will be enabled.
You will also notice the Booking price displayed for the selected booking period as shown below.
The date selected for booking the service
Let’s say that the customer selects 10th December 2017 and hence the price for booking for this date is $100.
When you click the Add to Cart button the order is added to your cart.
Clicking the View Cart button will redirect you to the Cart page which will show the booking details as shown below:
Cart page showing all details
Clicking the Proceed to checkout button will take you to the Checkout page which gives a preview of the actual order.
Please ensure you check everything and then click on the Place Order button.
The orders page shows all the details
Your order is now placed and you will receive an order confirmation as shown below:
Order details on the order confirmation page
Just like the WooCommerce Simple product used in the examples. you can apply this setting to Variable products too. Use the Fixed Date Range and see the magic!