Optimizing WooCommerce Bookings With 2 Way Google Calendar Sync And CSV Exporter

Back in 1965, SAS became the first airline to use an electronic booking system called SASCO (short for SAS Computer System), which resulted from close collaboration between SAS and IBM.

Although it was not an online system, it can be considered the first step to start optimizing the booking process, which is a time-consuming procedure. Standing in queues, waiting for your turn to fill out the form, and checking for available slots is really exhausting.

Today, online booking websites seem to keep improving and making things easy for customers and service providers. Airbnb, Booking.com, and Expedia are a few examples that are pretty popular nowadays.

Starting Your Own Online Booking System

One of the easiest solutions to start implementing your own online solution for managing bookings is to use WooCommerce Bookings. This WooCommerce extension helps you to sell time or date-based bookings and is perfect for those wanting to offer appointments, services, or rentals.  The author has shared detailed documentation on installing and setting up WooCommerce Bookings as per your requirements.  So we will move on here, and let’s dig into how we can make it more manageable, connecting it with Google Calendars and CSV Exporter.

Connecting With WooCommerce Bookings Two Way Google Calendar Sync

Although everything is easily manageable with WooCommerce Bookings, manually creating bookings from the dashboard is time-consuming. With this Woocommerce Bookings Google Calendar 2 Way Sync, you can easily create a booking right from your Google Calendar. You just need to add the word “booking” with your product name in your calendar’s event title, and the plugin will take care of the rest.

There are many possible Use cases of this plugin, which we will discuss in short. Getting excited? Check out their documentation to have a more clear idea.

Get The List Of Scheduled Bookings In Your Inbox

With WooCommerce Bookings Exporter, you can easily get all scheduled bookings directly in your inbox as PDF or CSV daily, weekly, or monthly.  You can even download a CSV of all bookings with different categories and date filters.

With WooCommerce Bookings Exporter, you will get the following features;

1. Option to export bookings in CSV or PDF format.
2. The exported CSV format can be viewed in Excel.
3. Filter options to apply before exporting bookings
4. Set schedules for daily, weekly, or monthly email reports.
5. Select, rename, and reorder Columns that you would like to export.
6. Create and save templates to make an efficient workflow.
7. Use saved templates from exporting bookings.
8. Option to set your own separator for the CSV file.

For more details, you can follow the documentation page of the WooCommerce bookings CSV Exporter plugin.

Use Cases

Let’s move to use cases to understand better how we can use these Woocommerce Plugins to get the most out of WooCommerce Bookings.

1. Hotel Reservations

Suppose you are using WooCommerce bookings for your online Hotel Booking system. Then you might have faced 2 issues.

1. You might be uncomfortable sharing dashboard access with your staff to create bookings.
2. There is no automated system to share bookings for the upcoming day.

With the above-discussed plugins, Woocommerce Bookings, Google Calendar 2-way Sync, and WooCommerce Bookings CSV Exporter, you will get the solution you sought.

Your staff can create bookings from shared Google Calendar using WooCommerce Bookings 2 way Google Calendar syncs just by typing the name of the booking room/service following the prefix “bookings –” which will book the respective time slot dynamically in WooCommerce Bookings and will make the respective time slot unavailable for future.

You can send daily, weekly, or monthly email reports for scheduled hotel bookings directly to the inbox of your staff using the WooCommerce Bookings CSV exporter plugin.

This way, neither would you be required to share your WordPress dashboard with your staff, nor would any scheduled bookings be missed on the way.

2. Hair Salon

Just like Hotel bookings, if someone is running a hair salon and has an online booking system running on WooCommerce bookings, there might be times when someone walks in the shop and asks to book an appointment for hair cutting at 10 am for the next day. On the other hand, another customer comes online and books the same 10 am time. Now, what can we do in such a situation?

Here is where WooCommerce Bookings’ two-way Google Calendar Sync might come in handy. Using this plugin, a Hair designer can use his/her Google Calendar to create a booking on the way from his/her smartphone, making the same slot unavailable from the WooCommerce Bookings online system.

No more hassle to log in to the dashboard and create bookings manually. The good thing about using this approach is you will have all your appointments visible in the calendar view, simplifying planning your day ahead.

Wrapping Up

You can think of many other use cases, like booking consultation services and appointments for Doctors. Although the basic WooCommerce Bookings Extension is really powerful, you can always optimize it using WooCommerce Bookings 2-way Google Calendar sync and Bookings Exporter plugin to simplify your workflow.

I am excited to hear how you foresee using these plugins to extend WooCommerce Bookings functionality. You can share your use case in the comments.