Amelia is a great booking plugin at this moment. Many of the sites using Amelia plugin to have a booking or appointment feature in the website. Amelia is a premium plugin that means you have to pay for this nice plugin. With a very few steps you can easily setup the booking feature in few minutes. You can also add any type of payment processor in your booking system like Paypal, Stripe.
After installing the plugin, you will see the following admin links in the WordPress admin panel.
Now we will walk through the setup steps of Amelia. We will also look at it why it is one of the best plugin in the market right now.
Step-1: Location
At First you need to create Employees inside the Amelia dashboard. Go to Amelia > Locations. Here you will see the below screen:
After coming to this page, you can click on “Add Location” or click on the blue circle plus button at bottom to create a new location. Look at below screen:
Here you need to fill in all the fields specially Name and address of your booking location. You can also specify the phone number of your booking location. It will be more helpful for the customers to make an enquiry about the booking time and location. Description field is optional, you can write in detail about the address of that booking slot.
You can also add an image of a specified location. After filling in all the fields you, click on Save button to complete the location.
Step-2: Employees
Second step is to create an Employee for the booking slot. You can create any number of employees. You can specify one employee for all bookings or you can create one employee for one booking slot.
Go to Amelia > Employees and you will see the below screen:
After coming to this page, you need to click on + Add Employee button or the +blue button at bottom to create an employee. You will see a screen like this:
Here is the main work for creating an employee. You need to give it a name of the employee. Please note that the email should be the official for your website. For example, if your website name is xyz.com then your email should be anyname@xyz.com. Amelia will not accept any other email rather than official email.
Here you can upload an image for that employee. You can also create a password for that specific Amelia employee. The next tab is Assigned Services. There you can select which services will be available for this employee but you can do this after creating the services. In this case you can just fill in the first tab.
You can specify the work hours for that employee. It is the most important part of the booking system. You can specify time for booking slot. You can also set any break time in the working hours. In the next tab you will see Days Off and Special Days. There you can specify and days off from the integrated calendar. In the Special Days tab, you can add any special days time may varies.
Step-3: Services
In this step we need to create Services. Go to Amelia > Services and you will see the below screen.
Here we need to add a category first. Then we will be able to add a service. Click on Add Category and you will see the below screen. Give it a category name and click on blue tick, it will be saved.
After saving the category, now you can create a service. Now click on Add Service and you will see the following screen:
Here is the main setting for the service. At first, add an image for the service though it is optional. Then name the service and select a service category that we have created in the last step. You will see a switch option to show this service on frontend or not. Then you can select whether a customer can book a recurring appointment at the same time. You can enable or disable it. then in the Description box, you can write detail of the service or if you have any terms and conditions you can specify that.
Duration & Pricing is the very next tab. Here you can select the duration and specify the price for the service. Buffer Time Before & After is the time between 2 consecutive booking slots. You can setup a buffer time for that specific service.
In the Gallery section, you can upload any number of related images of services. Extras tab will allow you to add extra service with that service. For example, you will teach horse riding 1 hour for $100. You can specify if you want 30 minutes more then you need to pay $50. This is a great option to add any extra service you may offer.
The next tab is Settings. Here you can specify any time as to when a customer can book an appointment. Click on General and see the settings. In the Payments section, you can add the payments gateway. You can also use all allowed payment methods that WooCommerce supports. This is a huge advantage of many website owners. Many site owners can offer any local payment method through WooCommerce. So, It is really easy to get paid for the appointment.
Step-4: How to show booking form on frontend
Now that you have created the Employees, Locations and Services. Its time to show the form on your website. We need to add a shortcode to show the form. You can show the services as catalogue and also as a STEP-BY-STEP form. Step-by-step is the latest addition of version 2.
Visit Amelia Short-codes link page to know the types of short-codes it offers. But here I am specifying few of the shortcodes that can show the booking appointment form.
[php]
[ameliabooking]
[/php]
It will show the basic step-by-step form. It is actually version 1. This is the first booking appointment look. You can say it is old look too.
[php]
[ameliastepbooking]
[/php]
It will show the latest step-by-step booking appointment form. This look is so classy. It is totally diferent from the version 1.
[php]
[ameliacatalogbooking]
[/php]
This shortcode will show the basic catalogue of the services. The catalogues will look like the grid with nice card like glossy design. Customers will like the design for sure.
There are many shortcodes available for Amelia booking. You can show the services by category, by locations, by employees too. If you visit the official Amelia shortcodes page, you will get a list of all the shortcodes.
If you visit Amelia > Settings, then you can see all settings of Amelia. Most important settings here is Payments and Notifications. In The Notifications panel, you can specify the email address where you want the booking confirmations emails to be sent. Then in the Payments panel you can setup any payment method want. You can also activate the plugin from this settings page.
Amelia also offers Calendar integration, Zoom integration, Outlook integration. Last but not the least you can customise the form look by going Amelia > Customize. You can setup your company brand colors, backgrounds so easily. This is the reason why million of website owners are using Amelia booking plugin. This is all! If you face any problem setting up Amelia, just comment below and I will help. To buy Amelia, just visit their official website.