When offering an online shopping cart experience to your potential customers, it’s important to align the availability of your product(s) and service(s) with their availability for offline channels, like phone and client dashboard orders.
In this article you’ll learn how to set up and edit your product availability and service time windows.
This article is Step 4 in setting up both Basic and Premium DocketShop. If you haven’t already read Step 3, please click here.
Table of Contents:
Access Availability and Time Windows for DocketShop Products
Set Up Availability
Set Up Time Windows
Before You Start
Here are a few things to know before you continue:
- You must have Admin or Office Staff permissions in order to set up DocketShop.
- You must have a phone number in your Docket profile.
- You must have at least one asset in your Docket account.
- You must have at least one pricing template set up or your pricing matrix imported into your Docket account.
- You must be set up with an online payment processor.
- DocketShop is separate from a website and cannot be used without one. Docket provides website services if you don’t already have one. To learn more, click here!
Please Note: It’s very important to add your assets and pricing templates or pricing matrix into Docket BEFORE having us activate your DocketShop subscription.
DocketShop automatically pulls in your asset inventory and pricing ONCE when it’s first activated. Moving forward you’ll need to manually update your assets and pricing information, so make sure you have most of the work done beforehand!
Access Availability and Time Windows for DocketShop Products
To view your pricing and servicing details for a product in DocketShop, click into Online Booking towards the top of your left-hand menu.
Once you’re in the DocketShop editor, click into Products.
Next you’ll click on the product you want to set up or adjust the availability or time window for.
Finally, click into the Availability or Time Windows tab at the top of the product’s details page.
Set Up Availability
The availability schedule in DocketShop automatically syncs your Hours of Operation set up under the Company > Hours of Operation settings. (Click here for more information on setting up your Hours of Operation.)
- Availability Sync Options gives you an easy way to automatically match this product’s availability to the rest of the products’ availability in this set. This is useful if you’ve created a product set that uses a different availability schedule than your normal hours of operation. To manually adjust the days this product is available, simply click on the days of the week you don’t want it available.
TIP: Days of the week that are blue indicate when a product is available while gray days of the week indicate when a product isn’t available. - Defer Scheduling Past Current Day is an optional setting that gives you even more flexibility around scheduling, empowering you to delay scheduling for a certain number of days for this product. For instance, if it’s set to ‘2 Day(s)’ and a potential customer looks at this product on a Monday, they won’t be able to book until Wednesday at the earliest.
- If you click on a certain day in the monthly calendar, Docket will highlight it blue and add it to the list of Blocked Service Start Dates. This means that a potential customer can’t schedule a product to be delivered on that day, which is very useful for observing holidays or vacations.
- Speaking of holidays, if you live in the United States you can click the “Add U.S. Holidays” button on the right to automatically block off all the nationally observed holidays for this product.
Don’t forget to click the blue ‘Save Changes’ button at the top!
Set Up Time Windows
Time windows are optional, but highly effective at keeping your online booking consistent. If you want to provide structured options to potential customers that match how you schedule your products and services offline, this area will help.
- Timeframe Interval defaults to No Timeframes, but you’ll probably want to select a specific time frame that divides the Timeframe Window Start and End times. For instance, if you select ‘1 Hour’, a potential customer will see 7am, 8am, 9am, etc…as options to choose from.
- Timeframe Window Start indicates when your business opens. When a potential customer goes to book a product, they won’t be able to schedule anything before this time.
- Timeframe Window End indicates when your business closes. When a potential customer goes to book a product, they won’t be able to schedule anything after this time.
- Servicing End Time only applies if you have the Timeframe Window Start and End fields filled in. You can decide if and when you ask for a specific time the potential customer would like their booking to end.
- Make Start and End Time Match is Disabled by default and we recommend that you don’t turn it on. If you do, the product or service must be picked up/finished by the exact time it was dropped off/started otherwise overage charges will apply.
- Servicing Start Time Offset gives you some breathing room around when a product or service needs to begin. Similar to the ‘Defer Scheduling Past Current Day’ setting under Availability, this setting can offset a start time by the amount you choose.
Don’t forget to click the blue ‘Save Changes’ button at the top!
Step 5 in setting up DocketShop is to set up your actual storefront. Click here to jump to the next article.
If you have any questions, please reach out to our Support team through the green chat widget on the bottom right of this page or by sending an email to support@yourdocket.com!