Thinking of managing appointments and bookings on your existing or new WordPress site? WooCommerce Appointments is the perfect plugin for handling appointments on your own website. They are arguably the #1 WordPress Appointment Booking Plugin. The appointment plugin is fully integrated with WooCommerce, WordPress and Google Calendar making it one of the best appointment scheduling too for your business and professional services.

When setting up online appointment booking, you choose whether clients should pay upfront or pay when they come in to complete their service. One of the challenge of not accepting payment upfront is that clients can easily cancel their appointment with no loss to them but to you. However, if you force clients to make either full or part payment at the time of booking, payment will automatically be applied when the appointment is booked. By asking clients to pay upfront, this reduces the likelihood of clients missing their scheduled appointments.

When accepting payment upfront, most of your clients would rather pay a deposit and pay the balance over time. Using PayFlexi will make it easier for your customers to pay and ensure that you reliably receive your turnover by enabling your customers to pay for your services as early as at the booking stage. This also means fewer missed appointments for you because the statistics prove that customers tend to turn up for appointments for which they have already paid.

Now that you know the need to collect upfront payment or payment plans, let me show you how to set this up for WooCommerce Appointments using PayFlexi.

First, Install the PayFlexi Wooccomerce plugin. After that, you can configure your WooCommerce Appointments booking settings. Click here for a get started page.

Once you have finished setting up PayFlexi as a payment option, clients can now pay in installment by selecting PayFlexi at the point of checkout.

After clicking on “Book Now”, they are redirected to the cart page. They click on Proceed to Checkout button there after.

On the checkout page, they can select “Pay with PayFlexi”. You can change the text that is shown to your customer.

The customer enters their details and selects their payment plans, as shown below. The customer would have to make an upfront payment as determined by you. You can configure the upfront amount on your PayFlexi business dashboard.

The installment option shown to the customer is based on the booking dates selected by the customer. This ensures that customer completes their payment before they get access to the service. Here is a typical booking scenario.

Weekly – Customer makes a booking or appointment 4 weeks from today

Maximum Installment frequency available at checkout

• Weekly: 3 Weeks
• Monthly: Not available

Monthly – Customer makes a booking or appointment 3 months from today

Maximum Installment frequency available at checkout

• Weekly: 11 Weeks
• Monthly: 2 Months

With PayFlexi, customers would have completed their payment plans before the appointment date.

You can monitor transactions and payments from your customers from a dedicated dashboard.

There are debates on whether or not you should take deposits for appointments or offer a payment plans options to your clients when booking an appointment. However, there are a number of reasons you should think about offering payment plans for appointments, and here are some;

• Payment plans increases a client’s commitment to their appointment and can reduce the number of ‘bad’ appointments.
• When a client cancels last minute or doesn’t show up for their appointment, you’re missing out on potential revenue.
• Offering payment plans help if your services require the purchase of supplies or tools in advance of the service. By requiring clients to pay a deposit or payment pans in advance, you don’t have to fund those purchases personally.
• Create an easy payment experience for your customers who cannot pay the full amount beforehand to prevent losing their orders.
• Immediate cash flow

To get started, register for a PayFlexi business account here – https://merchant.payflexi.co/signup