Wednesday, March 12, 2014

Taking payments for your online bookings

We're excited to announce a new great addition to FlexBooker that you can now make use of.

Online bookings are a wonderful way of driving more customers to your business, and helping existing customers re-book your services, classes, facilities, or events.

What's even better? Getting paid online for those bookings.

FlexBooker has partnered with Braintree payments (https://www.braintreepayments.com/) to give you the ability to accept credit card payments for your online bookings. You can choose exactly which schedules, or even specific times and days that you charge for, and how much.

You can even set up a "no-show fee", in which case we'll simply authorize the card, and you can optionally charge the no-show fee from your FlexBooker management app.

Everything is built-in seamlessly. Your customers still book via the widget just like now, and we'll automatically collect their payments for the appointments and times you choose, and you can manage refunds and no-show charging directly from FlexBooker.


Does it cost more?

We don't charge anything extra for you to accept credit card payments. No extra monthly fees, and no per transaction fees whatsoever.


Why Braintree?

Braintree are one of the world's leading, and most trusted, providers of credit card payments. They also will not charge you a monthly fee at all. They also don't charge a transaction fee for your first $50,000 in sales via Braintree(!). After that they offer truly competitive processing charges at just 2.9% + 30 cents per transaction.


What's Next?

With this release complete, our developers are right back to work on the next version, which will be heading your way in a couple of weeks. It includes:
  • a huge app design and interface overhaul to make navigation easier
  • introducing graphical calendars to the widgets, making it even easier for your customers to book from your website
  • powerful new metrics in the analytic and reporting section

More on that to come soon.

Monday, March 10, 2014

What makes FlexBooker different?

FlexBooker is all about helping you to drive more customers (both repeat and existing) to your business.

The team here is totally driven by that goal. That's our only objective, and it's the reason we come into work each day.

To that end we offer the most beautifully simple way to accept online bookings for your business. Everything from appointments, classes, events, facilities, and services can be set up in minutes. The booking "widget" can be installed on your website by simply copying and pasting a tiny snippet anywhere into your site.

To further that goal, we offer powerful functionality "under the hood" that help keep bookable times full. Features such as our one-of-a-kind automated wait list system. We literally do all the work to maintain the wait list for you, including keeping the order of the list, and also reaching out to customers when we notice that space opens up at a bookable time and trying to fill it back up with customers on the wait list. Nobody else offers you that, and it's something we're proud of.

But one thing we realized early on is that our customers are busy. Very busy. They often don't have time to keep checking and managing their schedule, closing off times and days, and keeping the system up to date. So we take a different approach to the manner in which you set up your schedule. Instead of telling us your opening hours, and having to sync up with other calendars, and keeping up the hours for when appointments come in from other sources (customers might still call, of course!) you tell us exactly when you what to take appointments and for what service and, optionally, employee. The whole process takes just a few minutes to set up from scratch to completion, and will save you huge amount of time in both the initial fiddling with settings you have to do with other systems, and also hours in ongoing maintenance of your schedule.

So are we different? Yes, both through our advanced automation offerings that nobody else has, and our client-first approach to schedule setup. FlexBooker truly is the beautifully simple way to accept online bookings.