Reservations

Typically a booking is not created until the checkout completes. To help prevent over and double bookings when 2 customers are placing an order simultaneously, BookThatApp supports the ability to reserve items as customers are going through the checkout process.

When an item is reserved it is temporarily taken out of stock for the dates/times in the reservation until the reservation expires or the customer completes their order.

Consider this scenario:

1. Customer 1 goes to the Product A (which has a capacity of 2) page and chooses March 1 for quantity 2.
2. At the same time, Customer 2 lands on the Product A page and chooses March 1 for quantity 1. This customer now clicks the Add to Cart button and is taken to the cart page.
3. Customer 1 now clicks the Add to Cart button. Oops! Overbooking!!

The reservation feature prevents this scenario by checking that a reservation can be created on the cart page. If there is an overbooking situation the customer (Customer 1 in the scenario above) will see an error message and have the opportunity to adjust the quantity or change the dates. Since it also takes the items out of inventory, if Customer 1 had hit the Add to Cart button in step 1 above, Customer 2 would not have been able to choose March 1 as it would have been unavailable.

The Reservation Widget

The reservation widget is used to provide the user interface for the reservation feature in BookThatApp. As of early 2024, new customers of the app automatically have the Reservation Widget installed. 

For existing app users you can add this feature to your store by following these steps:

• Access Widgets from the BookThatApp Admin menu
• Select the Enable button found in the Reservations section of the page
  

There are several settings for the widget that can be accessed by selecting the Click here link found in the Reservations section of the page as seen above.

We recommend setting the expiration minutes to a reasonable period that allows your customers to complete their checkout. Avoid setting it at too large of a number (e.g. 24 hours), otherwise you will miss out on bookings because customers who abandon the cart will still have the items reserved.