Product Vendors for WooCommerce

This feature request is most definitely for Product Vendors and WooCommerce Bookings working together more seamlessly and I am wondering if others need the same thing. Currently WooCommerce Bookings does ‘work’ with Product Vendors and its a big improvement on the first version albeit a little limited and I do understand from speaking to the great team and woo that product vendors currently is more suited to physical products. However typically service providers who need a booking system in a marketplace type scenario will want to use one booking calendar to organise their week/month/year of bookings.

1. A simple scenario is this; A customer rings up the vendor and says I want to book tomorrow at 3pm, the vendor would of course check their calendar to make sure their are no conflicts and then pencil the person in. The issue is the vendor right now cannot pencil this person in from the backend of the website, they would literally need to tell the customer to go to the website and make the booking online in order to have one unified calendar view of their week of bookings. Of course the vendor could write down the booking and say come in for your booking tomorrow at 3pm but then their is an online calendar that has a free slot at 3pm tomorrow and immediately their could very well be a conflict.

2. A person does book through the site and then comes into the vendor for their appointment. The vendor then says you need to come once per week for 2 more weeks. Again the vendor is left with no choice but to write it down with pen and paper as their is no way to just book in the customer for say the same time next week and the week after. I am actually not talking about recurring bookings here at all to be honest, I am just saying their is no way right now to manually create a booking for next week and then the week after in two separate steps even. Also if you could do this the customer would get their reminders via the website the next week and the week after, they would get their receipts and they would ultimately get used to the idea of booking online and using the site more often.

So the solution as far as I can tell is that a Vendor should be able to see users that have booked his or her service from the User area of the backend of the website. Right now the user area is entirely turned off but of a bookings website this is not ideal at all of course. Also the Vendor should be able to add new users who have never booked on the website through the user area of the backend of the website – just like an overall administrator would but of course that user that has been added is just added as a regular customer.

This would mean that the vendor could potentially use the woocommerce booking plugin as their unified calendar for all their bookings. It means more bookings are taken on the website and no more pencil and paper organising. Currently adding product vendors and woocommerce bookings just means another calendar that the vendor has to manage and try to avoid conflicts on. It would be amazing to allow vendors add customers and of course only see customers that have booked their services. This is definitely for me right now a number one feature request for product vendors. I am not 100% sure of its application inside a physical store, I imagine its not really a requirement at all, but maybe I am wrong as my head is solely here testing out the Bookings element and product vendors. Any ideas and thoughts are most welcome. thanks for your time everyone.