Appointment Booking App | BTA

Dec. 11, 2023

Needs more development. I used your app for almost 4 months as an Activity/tour booking system for adult and children tickets. However, I had to uninstall it due to several issues. First, the app didn't allow bookings during events, resulting in the loss of many ticket sales. For example, if we had an event running from 9am to 5pm, customers could only book before 9am. I suggest adding a feature in the backend, like a checkbox, that allows us to "allow customer to book while event is in progress," similar to other apps. Second, the enrollment and runsheet reports combine the totals for adults and children, making it difficult to track individual ticket types. This requires manually checking each booking. It would be helpful to separate each ticket variant in reports to easily track the number of tickets sold for each type. I hope you can fix these issues soonest.

June 25, 2022

We were using this app to run bookings for our high end rental property. I didn't think it would be difficult. It's stopped working twice, costing us thousands. Shopify needs better app implementation. This is a pain-in-the-ass.

Oct. 14, 2021

The app is great for accomplishing a lot of complex setups, but it has two major design problems that won't allow businesses that have tasting rooms, like a brewery or winery to use the app. Unfortunately, they don't have a way to provide feedback or request product enhancements to the developers either. I found their support to be very condescending at times, and they tend to treat you like you're an idiot rather than try to help you understand their product. The app makes the assumption that a staff member can't handle appointments/reservations of a capacity of more than one person. I get that makes sense for a lot of businesses, but I think that decision should be up to the end-user and not enforced by the app. Like most small tasting rooms we are limited in staff so we need to be able to not allow people to book appointments for a tasting if our staff is out of the office or busy, and the app determines staff free/busy time by syncing with any calendar app that supports iCal, which is a really nice feature. But there is no way other than associating a staff member to an appointment type to block out a time slot based on staff availability unless you associate that staff member to the appointment type. Once you do that you've limited the number of people that can attend an appointment to 1 person because one staff member is limited to a capacity of 1. Like most small tasting rooms we only have one bar where we do private tastings, and it seats 8 people, so when we schedule a private tasting we limit it to 8, but again, we can't both limit appointments based on staff availability AND the capacity of our tasting room bar, it's one or the other. If they would just fix staff resources so we could define the capacity a staff can handle then everything would work just fine, but they refuse to even consider it from my discussions with them so far. Their only recommendation was to use equipment in place of staff because if you can set capacity on equipment, but the equipment type doesn't allow you to associate a free/busy calendar to it. Their underlying schema must support capacity for staff because when you export staff from the product to CSV there is a capacity/inventory column that is set to 1 for staff, but they said it's hardcoded and can't be changed (I already tried importing with the Inventory set to 8, and it just reset it back to 1). And there's no way to file enhancement requests to their development team. Honestly, the product is so powerful I really find it hard to believe that there isn't a way to accomplish what I need, but to date, their support has been of little help trying to help me solve it, and they no longer offer paid install/configuration support so you're going to be stuck figuring out difficult setups by yourself because their support gets impatient really quick if there isn't an easy answer to your problem...I've practically begged to pay them in the past and they have no interest at all. The primary reason I'm giving it a 2-star rating is because of their support and unwillingness to accept product feedback or enhancement request other than filing a support ticket, which to date just keeps getting closed with the resolution that the product can't do what I need. And their unwillingness to do provide custom support even if you're willing to pay for it. It's very possible that I was just unlucky and happened to get the same person every time I opened a ticket, but I've opened quite a few tickets over the past several months and I had the same experience each time. I'm not giving up yet, mostly because there aren't many better options, and I'm just hoping with a little more tweaking I'll figure something out. This all said, if I was the type of business like the ones they discuss in a lot of their examples, I probably would have had a much better experience and a lot fewer problems. I could see giving it a 4 star, maybe a 5-star rating if I didn't have to talk to their support and I was running a hair or nail salon. Also, take a minute to read all the responses to any reviews that didn't give a 4-star or higher rating and that will be the type and tone of responses you will get from their support when you run into tougher problems to solve. I would guess that there are probably a much higher percentage of people that use their products that never have to deal with support, if you're one of them then you probably love the product.

Jan. 18, 2021

Now after 9 months of use, I feel that this review is more accurate/fair - In principle, and when working smoothly, this app is the best I found in regards to customisation and complexity. Why I chose this app - I have 47 members of staff, all of which offer a variety of services/products in various locations. Therefore, needing a booking platform that'll allow a member of staff to be assigned 'services/products' they are able to offer. As well as 'locations' in which these services/products can be offered... Now, if a staff member has been assigned a service, in a location that takes 'X' amount of time, that member of staff needs to show as unavailable at that time (plus a 15min buffer perhaps)... The last thing any business needs is for that member of staff to be double booked - Hence the need for a booking system that will allow you to set the service/product offering of a staff member, as well as setting the location in which they work. I genuinely haven't found another app offering a solution for this. However, over the last 6 months of the website being live, I'm still getting the same issues reoccurring. These are just some examples - Regularly allows double bookings - You're on you own here, they'll 'fix' it, but it won't last long (lost count of how many times this has happened) No 'locations' saved on appointments - You've got a booking, but where?? Customer remarks - "I can't select any dates from the calendar" "There's no dates to select... Just says no availability" "I can select a date, but then says no times available? I've gone through 10 dates??? Why can I select them if there's no times available???" "I can't checkout, just says you reservation can't be saved?" BTA customer support - "Your customer is using an out of date browser" - Meaning they can double book. So now you need to explain to the customer why you cant fulfil their order. "What device and browser did your customer use to book?" - I don't know? Whilst this might help to resolve the issue, it's not good for business. I've been paying for highest service package, just to be told - "We process tens of thousands of bookings successfully per day, so yes I would say the app is delivering value for the thousands of merchants that use it" I'm constantly having to get in touch to resolve issues, I dread to think how many lost sales there are as not all customers get in touch with us to let us know there's a problem, and just move on. No resolve. Just expected to accept this is what happens. I originally left a 5* review after too shorter timescale to have really had any experience of using the app. After a few months of use, discovering more and more issues and lack of customer service, I then left a poor review. However, retracted it after Alex contacted me looking to resolve my many issues. This review is more accurate, and fair.

Dec. 26, 2019

The app is simply put a confusing mess. The language explaining the features is really hard to understand. Whoever planned the logic and user experience behind this app did not do a good job. I got a much more clear and concise feeling from the Webkul Booking app. Support gave me a boilerplate excuse regarding the customisation of my theme to justify not reading the actual question (they have a special page that is supposed to detail what to do on my theme but it isn't up to date). The features I care the most about (minimum blocks of time) aren't available. I originally tried the app because of the impressive reviews. I am now doubting that they are real.

Nov. 2, 2019

The app builds a calendar and keeps somewhat a decent track of classes but the customer service is not good at all. Every time something goes wrong and we email support, the support team says it is Shopify's fault, not theirs. Thing go haywire alot. Wrong time and dates are sent as customer confirmations, events do not close when sold out. We have never been helped, only told to change the coding in Shopify and to contact Shopify to let them know their coding is wrong.

July 28, 2018

App functions well enough but customer support SUCKS. I booked with these guys for 6 months and couldn't take it anymore so I found another solution. Every time I had a problem they would respond with "well that's not included but you can pay us more and we'll fix it" or "our app never did that" when functionality would stop working suddenly. Customer service always treated me like an idiot and refused to help while my customers couldn't pay me for my services because of their app. I was paying these guys $20 a month which is almost as much as the entire website and could never get help. Unfortunately, they have a monopoly on the booking market in regards to Shopify so there aren't many other options. My suggestion would be to use a different web platform if you want to rent products. Shopify isn't built to handle rentals easily. It's constantly a workaround to get things to work.

March 23, 2018

Greetings. I installed this app today (March 23, 2018), and I proceeded to follow the installation steps. Step #2 was straightforward, except that it changed the layout of my current products into a non-aesthetically pleasing layout. Step #3 of the installation required deleting a theme code and installing a new theme code. The issue was that I used ctr+F to locate the exact code they instructed that I delete, and it was not there. This made me COMPLETELY apprehensive to paste the subsequent coded information in. So, I decided to undo the previous installation steps which restored my previous product page layout (THANK GOODNESS), and decided to go with another app. Take Away: Sometimes a penny saved is a not a penny earned. #StayVigilant

May 21, 2014

Our company is an online tour booking company. The app performs as stated per all the previous postings except one major flaw in the coding. This app only verifies the existing inventory when an item(s) are placed in the cart. It does not verify the existing inventory against what has been already placed in the cart and if the customer adds to the cart with the same item the app will allow overbooking of the item or tour beyond the maximum that has been setup in the app. Try it out on your own product page, enter the maximum number of items you have available to your cart, then add it again and again and again. It will keep adding to the cart and allow the customer to check out. This will cause overbooking of our tours and a customer nightmare. We have brought this to the developers attention and they stated it was not a concern they were willing to address. I have researched this and spoke with other developers, the calls for the cart items are provided by Shopify and verifying this information would be a simple fix. If you are booking limited quantities with this app be aware of this short coming and the possibility of overbooking.