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Elizabeth Bachner
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December 4, 2012 at 5:51 pm
I am needing an “on line” scheduling product for clients to book their own services (massage, acupuncture, etc…). I know you have it for classes and events, but do you have something for services offered too?
Thanks, Elizabeth
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This topic was modified 4 years, 8 months ago by
 Garth.
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Orest Ohar
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December 4, 2012 at 10:13 pm
Event Espresso (EE) will do that job, you just need to design a strategy for laying it out to present it effectively to self-seerve clients. For example if you create an event for every 2 hour block in a day for your services (2 blocks in the AM and 2 in the PM); set the attendee limit to one; then clients would only see the time slots that were available. If they purchase the slot, EE will drop it off the calendar. Have your clients shop primarily off the calendar (do not show an event list because it might be too confusing). Set the calendar to WEEKLY view. Setup the questions during registration so that the client can choose from a list of your services. Charge them on-line for HALF your fee, collect the remainder after services rendered. The client side of this should work well and your customers will be able to get their scheduled pre-paid slot, but on the Admin panel EE’s Event Overview screen won’t show you in an intuitive way what your schedule will be. So EE will sell your time slots and make the purchasing experience for the client work well and collect your money for reservations, but you might find it confusing to assemble a concise schedule from your point of view. Other good news — EE will scale well using CATEGORIES to represent several partners, each partner can have their own Calendar to sell time slots, clients can choose to purchase from their favorite service provider… If the back-end schedule is important, hire a developer. The database has all the info collected to assemble a schedule for each worker, it just needs to be displayed better for your type of business. I don’t know if any plugin developers have a time scheduler, but EE can be configured to do your selling.
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Dean
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December 5, 2012 at 3:39 am
Hi,
As Orest has already mentioned it is more than possible to set up this type of system with Event Espresso, even though it’s original purpose isn’t for scheduling.
As such you may need to tweak the system here and there to get it just right for you but thats generally how these things go with most large scale plugins.
If you have any further questions just let us know.
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Dean
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December 5, 2012 at 3:40 am
@Orest – Thank you! It’s great to see the community in action helping everybody out, it is appreciated 😀
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Orest Ohar
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December 5, 2012 at 5:39 am
Dean, I like to read what people are asking about, because answers from Support often gives me ideas about how to implement some of the new elements of EE. You guys have been adding lots of functionality in the last year alone. Like Attendee Short Codes looks interestingly powerful. I never thought of using them, but now I have a new EE element to explore.
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Dean
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December 5, 2012 at 7:17 am
@Orest, yes, we do love to add that functionality in there, and there is more to come with 3.1.29 and when 3.2 eventually lands it should be interesting. If you don’t already, keep an eye on the Changelog, it lists everything we have done in the versions.
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