Bookings Use Case: Multi-Vendor Shop (Example with Product Vendors)

This scenario will walk you through how to use WooCommerce, WooCommerce Bookings and WooCommerce Product Vendors to sell bookable products from other vendors on your website. Vendors can take a commission for each reservation.

Matty owns a restaurant and one of his chefs offers a family friendly cooking class for adults and children. Since the chef would like to utilize the restaurant’s kitchen, Matty is taking some commission from each booking for the use of the space. Matty sets up a bookable product that utilizes Product Vendors so that bookings are associated with the specific vendor (the chef) and commissions can easily be paid out manually or automatically. In the future, he would like to bring in guest chefs to teach ongoing booking classes and set them up as vendors on his website.

• Matty has 25% revenue on each booking. The vendor gets 75% commission.
• The cooking classes are held every Saturday at 11 am and are 2 hours long.
• It’s a small restaurant and can only hold up to 18 seats.
• Classes include an adult and child pricing.

• WooCommerce
• WooCommerce Bookings
• WooCommerce Product Vendors

First, we’ll set up the user and profile for the vendor, then create a bookable product for the cooking class.

The vendor will need a user account on your site. If they already have an account on your site, you will only need to set their role.

1. In the sidebar of your WordPress Admin, click on Users > Add New User.
2. On the Add New User page, fill out the fields as desired, including username and email. This will be your Product Vendor’s account.
3. Check the box to Send user notification so that the vendor receives the log in information.
4. Under the Role dropdown, select Vendor Admin. This will give your Product Vendor the ability to administrate their products.
5. To save, click the Add New User button.

Now your vendor has an account and the Vendor Admin role.

Once your vendor has an account on the site we’ll need to set up their profile:

1. In the sidebar of your WordPress Admin, go to Products > Vendors.
2. Under Add New Vendor, add the name and email of your vendor, in our use case, this would be the chef’s name and email.
3. Click the Add New Vendor button.
4. From the right-hand table, click on your newly created vendor name to edit their profile. You’ll be routed to the Edit Vendor page where you can add profile details such as their logo, public vendor profile description, commission, etc.
5. In the Vendor Admins field, add the vendor’s email address. Adding a vendor to the Vendor Admins field will allow the user to administrate their products.
6. For our use case, the chef will receive a 75% commission. Under the Commission field, enter 75 and keep the Commission Type drop down as Percentage.
7. Under Tax Handling, you can choose if you keep the taxes, included in the commission, or split. More on vendor tax handling can be found here.
8. For our use case, the restaurant owner would like to automatically send commissions to the vendor instantly. To enable this, check the box under Instant Payout and add the vendor’s PayPal Email address. Note that automated payouts to vendors can only be done with PayPal accounts. Full details on how to set up the Instant Payouts are here.
9. Finally, check the box for Enable Bookings Feature. This allows the vendor to log in and create their own bookable product.
10. Click the Update button to save.

Now your vendor is fully set up and can create their bookable product.

Now that our chef has a vendor profile set up, let’s get the cooking class product created.

To set up the bookable product we’ll need to create a new product, assign it to our vendor, then configure its settings:

1. In the sidebar of your WordPress Admin, go to Products > Add New.
2. Under Product data select Bookable product.
3. Select the options for Virtual and Has Persons for this use case.
4. On the right-hand side of the product editor, scroll down the widgets to Vendors and select the vendor you just created in the steps above. This setting assigns the bookable product to the vendor.

The general settings for the bookable product are where we’ll set the duration for the booking.

1. For our use case, we want to keep the default product vendor settings, so we do not need to make any changes under the Product Vendors settings.
2. Set Booking duration to Fixed block of 2 Hours.
3. Publish the product to save.

Your availability needs may vary depending on your specific bookable product, in this example we’ll set up a cooking class that happens on Saturdays from 11am to 1pm:

1. Click into the Availability tab.
2. Set Max bookings per block to 18.
3. Set All dates are… not-available by default.
4. Set First block starts at … 11:00 AM
5. To add specific date and time ranges, click the Add Range button to add a range rule.
6. Under Range Type, select Saturday and Range as 11 AM - 1 PM, and Bookable as Yes.

Configuring persons lets customers book for groups all at once, and lets us charge different amounts for adults than children. To set up the persons settings for this example:

1. Click into the Persons tab.
2. Set Min persons to 1 and Max persons to 18.
3. Check the box for Multiply all costs by person count.
4. Check the box Count persons as bookings. This allows you to tie a person to a booking so for each person added will count toward filling up one of the 18 spots.
5. Check the box to Enable person type.
6. Under the Person Types rules, click the Add person type button.
7. In the Person Type Name field, enter Adult
8. In the Base Cost field add the price per adult. In our use case it is 10.
9. In the Min field, include a minimum number of adults. In our use case we want to make sure there is at least one adult supervising the child).
10. Repeat Steps 6-9 to add Child.
11. Update the booking product to save.

On the front end, the customer can select the number of adults and children for their cooking class. You will notice in the screenshot that customers can see how many slots are left for that date when others have booked already: