Introduction
Do you want to setup products bookable on specific days and time? You can have two main different approaches that depend on your needs:
- Products are only visible for specific times/days
- Products are visible but cannot be booked in specific times/days
Products not visible in specific times/day
The first thing you need to do is creating a 'Period' which will contain all setting and information about when this product(s) shouldn't be visible.
Example : every Sunday, from 6pm to 8pm, weekends, etc..
Periods of time
The first thing to do is to create a period of time. This is where the date and time of the period are declared.
- Go to Menu - System - Configuration - Periods of time, you can see the current setup there.
- Click on the '+' icon and give it an Name. - You can also copy an existing one and modify it.
- Then Click on the '+' icon below the 'Period of time lines' tab. Change the ‘Start’ and ‘Stop’ period if necessary. For example, if you have an Easter promotion, you can put the start and stop date of the Easter holidays.
- In case it's a period that belongs to an entire days you normally don’t need to change the ‘Start time’ and ‘Stop time’. (e.g. Thursdays, weekends, etc..)
- Click Save.
Pages
After creating a period of time, you can now assign it to the desired page. That page will be visible only during the period of time you configured.
- Go to Menu - Product - Pages, here you can see all the current pages.
- Select an page or Create One.
- The summary page is now visible.
- Click on Periods of time Tab.
- Select the desired value.
- Click Save.
In the tutorial below we are going to create Thursday Deals with products visible only on thursdays!
Products visible but not bookable in certain times/days
The first thing you need is to have a clear idea of the booking opening hours and the products that you have online. This way, when you set opening and closing times of online booking, you can also set which product group is possible in a specific schedule or schedule line. The idea is that in each schedule you can configure products limitations to book only certain products or to exclude some products. For example you can setup that in the early afternoon hours (e.g. from 4pm to 7pm), only kids sessions are available and in the evening (e.g. from 7pm to 11pm), only adult sessions are available. For this specific case you would need two product groups, one containing kids product and an other one containing adults products. The product groups can be created in two different versions :
- Include : the product group includes only the products that it contains
- Exclude: the product group contains all the products in the system except the one that it contains.
Configuration
- Go to Menu – Activities – Resources or Groups from your Point of Sales or Configurator application
- Select the resource or the group and double click
- Go to Schedule tab
- Double click on the schedule
- Select the product limit, otherwise you can create it.
- Click ‘Apply’
In the tutorial below I am going to configure a products visible only from 4pm to 5pm for a Happy Hour Bowling Promotion. This means that the products will be bookable only from 4pm to 5pm. Since Bowling has different lanes, it's configured under Resources Group instead of Resources, but the schedule setup is exactly the same.