The Booking & Appointment Plugin for WooCommerce comes with a time saver feature called ‘Bulk Booking Settings’, which allows the store owner to add booking settings to multiple products from one place.
Instead of visiting each individual product page and applying the booking settings to it, one can add booking settings to multiple products in one go. This saves the store owner time and makes adding settings easy.
Settings List ⤵️
1. Configuring Bulk Booking Settings
2. Bulk Booking Settings for Products
3. Bulk Booking Settings for Products Categories
4. Save Selected Options as Default
1. Configuring Bulk Booking Settings
Go to Booking & Appointment Tab > Settings > Bulk Booking tab.
The ‘Select Products and/or Categories‘ field will be available to select multiple products or product categories.
Upon clicking this option, the dropdown will display an ‘All products’ option. This option will display a list of individual products in your store and options with different Product Categories.
You can select the option of your choice. Based on it, the Booking meta box will appear as shown below:
2. Bulk Booking Settings for Products
Let’s say you run a website that allows people to book appointments with multiple doctors. You want to set up appointments with all or multiple doctors (products) using the Booking plugin.
All the doctors can be booked from 10:00 – 11:00, 11:00 – 12:00, 12:00 – 13:00, 16:00 – 17:00, 17:00 – 18:00, and 18:00 – 19:00 on all days.
Using Fixed Time booking type and Bulk Booking functionality, this can be set up easily for multiple products.
As can be seen above, Doctor A, Doctor B, and Doctor C are selected in the ‘Products and/or Categories‘ field. The required settings have also been enabled in the General tab.
Now, let’s create the time slots in the Availability tab.
After adding all the time slots, click the Save Settings button. This action will add all the selected booking settings in Doctor A, B, and C products.
3. Bulk Booking Settings for Products Categories
Now, let’s say that you wish to add bulk booking settings based on different Product Categories.
You can select the specific product category you want.
For instance, here we have selected all the products that fall under the ‘Boat Tour’ product category.
Following this, you can enable the booking for it, select a Booking Type for it, configure the Availability settings, and then click on Save Settings to apply the settings to all the products in the selected Product Category.
If you want to add booking settings for all products, you can select the ‘All Products‘ option in the Products field and enable the required settings in the Booking Meta box. Clicking the Save Settings button will save selected booking settings for all products.
In the same way, booking settings can be applied according to the different booking types: Single-Day, Multiple-Night, and Duration-Based Time.
If you need to change a setting for a particular product after applying it in bulk, visit the individual product page.
Note: If the product selected in the ‘Products’ field already has booking settings, they will be overridden by the new settings selected in the Booking meta box.
If you want to add, delete, and update availability-related information only for multiple products, you can use the Booking plugin’s Manage Availability of Products functionality.
4. Save selected options as default
Site admins can also set default booking options while adding bulk booking settings. This feature saves time setting values when you create a bulk booking.
The option to set the default booking option is present just above the ‘Save Setting’ button, as shown in the image:
You will have to tick the checkbox and click on Save Settings. Let us see how this setting can be used.
Let’s assume that you run online Guitar classes for different levels. You will most likely use the ‘Fixed Time’ booking type along with the ‘Persons’ setting as your Booking settings for most of your products.
You can fill in these settings and tick the checkbox for the default option setting, as shown here:
This would mean that the next time you try configuring bulk booking settings, the settings you added will be readily available by default.
There is a button with the ‘Reset Default Settings’ option to help you clear the default values and set unique product options.
Upon clicking this button, it will scrape off all the previous default booking options. While it is in this process, the button will have the message Default Booking Settings have been reset successfully in a green box, as shown below:
Once done, your Bulk Bookings Page will be refreshed as a new one without the previous default settings.
Thus, with the Bulk Booking settings, you can seamlessly set the same booking settings for all your products from one place.