Blackout Days: Booking App for Shopify

Booking app by Webkul helps the merchants to sell services and rent items on their Shopify store.

The app comes with multiple features such as overwrite booking days, Google calender, ICS file download, integration with the Multi-vendor Marketplace app for Shopify, etc.

Now, we have come up with the blackout days feature in the booking app for Shopify that allows you to effortlessly manage the availability of the slots for rent type bookings.

You will have the option to configure when to cut off the dates while accepting rental bookings. Those cut off dates will not be available in the booking calendar for customers to rent items.

Note:- This feature is exclusively implemented for “Rent Type” bookings.

You can configure the blackout dates settings while creating a rent type booking product in the app. Before getting into the details, let’s understand how to create rental bookings in the app.

RENT TYPE BOOKINGS

You can create rental type bookings in the app to offer rental products such as bike on rent, jewelry on rent, rental dresses, etc on your website.

All you need to do is just add a date range when your booking product is available for rent. 

The customer will select a start and end date from the added date-range and rent the product.
Example:- Hire a cycle, Rent a car, etc

Steps to Create Rent Type Bookings:

• Step 1: Go to the Products section of your Shopify store. Select a product & click on the Booking Product button in the Action menu.
  
  OR You can simply go to the app and click the “Add Booking Product” button in the “Booking Product” section.
  
• Step 2: Select a variant, if required & proceed to fill additional details of the product such as Single-user or Multi-user booking & service location.
  
• Step 3: Select the Booking type as “Rent Type”. Select a date range when you want the bookings to be available for rent.
  
• Step 4: Add custom information in case you want to display some required information about your bookings & add custom fields to take some additional info from customers.

After you get return of your rented item, you may require some time to get the item in a good position.

Suppose you offer rental dresses on your website. Once the customer returns the rental dress, you need to dry clean it before offering it to another customer.

For this, you may require the time of 2-3 days to get it done and make it ready to be rented again.

So, the blackout dates settings will allow you to make the rental items unavailable for the customers based on the pre & post date settings.
Let’s understand the scenario in detail.

Pre Blackout Days:- In the app, you need to enter the no of the days you want to block before the booking date.

Example: Suppose product A is booked for 15th March & Pre blackout days is set to 2 then, the product will be unavailable for 13th & 14th of March.

Post Blackout Days:- In the app, you need to enter the no of the days you want to block after the booking date.

Example: Suppose product A is booked for 15th March & Post blackout days is set to 3 then, the product will be unavailable for 16th, 17th & 18th of March.

You can configure the blackout days while adding/editing any rental booking product in the app.

NOTE:- If you set both pre & post-blackout dates then, the bookings will not be available on the dates based on the overlapping criteria. Overlapping : You need to configure this setting in the app.

Based on this, you can configure if you want to overlap the pre & post blackout days for the rental bookings or not.

Overlapping Cases

You need to enable/disable the allow overlapping button as per the requirement.

Case 1: When you enable overlapping, the system blocks the dates before and after the blackout period based on the greater value between the pre and post-blackout days.

Example:– If you enable overlapping and book product A for 15th March with a pre-blackout date of 2 and a post-blackout date of 3,

the system will make product A unavailable from 12th to 18th March, using 12th March to satisfy the post-blackout criteria.

Case 2: When you disable overlapping, the system blocks the dates before and after the blackout period by adding the pre and post-blackout days.

Example:– Suppose you book product A for 15th March with a pre-blackout date of 2 and a post-blackout date of 3.

If you disable overlapping, the system will make product A unavailable from 10th to 20th March.

In this case, the system blocks a total of 5 days before and after the booking date (2 pre-blackout days plus 3 post-blackout days).

Lead Days:- This is the no. of days you want to close the bookings starting from the current date.
In other words, the lead day is no. of days after which you can allow customers to book a product.

To configure this, Go to Configuration>>Rent Type Config>>Enter the values>>Save Changes.

Based on this configuration, the slots will be available for the cutomers in the booking calendar on your store front.

You can click on the link below to get the backend as well as frontend demo link:- https://webkul-booking-app-demo-2.myshopify.com/pages/booking-products

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