Most of the appointment plugins found on the internet most of the time are managed and operated by wordpress developers and experienced individuals. But, there are very few appointment plugins that are beginner-friendly and Amelia is one of them.
In this article, we will dig down the Amelia WordPress appointment booking plugin and will try to find out whether Amelia is worth our money and time or not.
Read further to learn more about Amelia, we will detail its features, pros and cons with our rating, and a conclusion about why you should use it. Let’s dig it out!
Click on “open” if you want to see exactly what we will talk about in the rest of this article:
Booking and managing appointments is the essence of businesses that provide services to large numbers of people. Amelia is the plugin that serves the purpose of Booking and managing appointments. Amelia is the most feature-rich and affordable booking manager for WordPress websites with a smooth and shiny interface. Suitable for Appointments & Events!
Amelia WordPress booking plugin specifications
Features
Analytics / Appointments / Automations / Booking / Events / Google calendar sync / Google meet integration / Outlook calendar sync / SMS notifications / Team access / Woocommerce compatible / Zoom integration
Amelia’s rates are very simple, the price varies only according to the number of desired domains. If you have only one WordPress site, it will cost you either 53€/year or 166€ lifetime. For 3 sites, 95€/year or 337€ lifetime. And finally, for an unlimited number of sites, it will cost you 217€/year or 513€ lifetime.
Amelia offers 4 different demos to give you an idea of what can be done with their WordPress plugin. The demos are all based on the Bridge Theme, a premium theme sold on Themeforest.
Amelia booking plugin provides business owners and managers with a dashboard page that summarizes all business-critical KPIs and displays them in widgets, charts, and tables that allow checking the performance with a 5 seconds glance.
Step by step Amelia booking System
One of the front-end views provided by Amelia is a classic step-by-step booking process, implemented with a focus on smooth UX in a single-page-app style. The entire booking process is very easy to understand and easy to navigate. Customers can quickly pick services, employees, location, date and time, and the payment details, and change any of the settings without leaving the page.
Admin calendar view
Admin and employees can track the appointments in a dynamic calendar view. The calendar can present appointments for monthly, weekly, daily and timeline views, and can be filtered by employee, location, service or service category.
Amelia allows you to provide your users with a search interface, where booking services and time slots will be suggested by one or more search criteria, such as preferred date, preferred time range, preferred service or category.
SMS Notifications
Be in instant touch with your customers and employees – communicate with them through SMS text messages.
Custom services schedule
Take advantage of full scheduling flexibility with the custom services schedule feature – configure the working hours and breaks individually per service and employee combinations.
Special days
With just a few clicks configure non-recurring days with special working hours and service schedules.
Schedule Recurring Appointments
Make sure your customers will become your returning customers by letting them schedule recurring appointments. Choose whether your appointment recurrence is daily, weekly, monthly or yearly. Maintain your customers satisfied on regular-basis.
Custom Fields for booking forms
Construct the booking form to match your business best – configure the custom fields (checkboxes, textareas, etc.) to collect any additional necessary information from your customers.
Event Calendar Booking form
With the Amelia plugin, you can view the events in a monthly calendar form so that the potential attendants can look, filter and book the events.
WooCommerce Integration
Take care of all your payments, taxes and invoices by using native Amelia WooCommerce integration.
Native Zoom integration
In a few clicks, you can connect your Zoom account with Amelia. Now your customers can book online appointments and events, and get a link to access them in the notification. This integration will save you a ton of time and help reduce no-shows.
Google Calendar Synchronization
Let your employees keep track of all appointments in their own Google Calendar.
Events
Configure one-off or repeating events like conferences, classes, meetups, concerts, or anything else – provide a smooth and easy front-end event booking interface and comprehensive attendance management in the back-end!
Search interface for bookings
A convenient search-like interface to look for a suitable service, employee, and time by choosing one or more filter criteria.
Step-by-step booking wizard
An alternative way of scheduling appointments by choosing one parameter (service, employee, date) at each step.
Catalog view for services
Quickly create an excellent looking services catalog with just several clicks.
Insightful dashboard and reporting
Keep an eye on how your business performs – track the most important financial and conversion-related KPIs through charts in a dashboard.
Calendar and list view
Amelia provides multiple options for managing the workflow, depending on the level you want to track: monthly, weekly, daily calendar view, timeline, or just an interactive list of appointments.
Manage multiple employees
Keep employee’s contact data in the WordPress database, manage individual load and performance, configure personal working schedule and days off.
Manage multiple locations
If you have several business locations, you can efficiently manage this with Amelia, storing contact data, address, and geolocation.
Individual employee or service booking forms
Each form that you publish to the site’s front-end can be customized: it can allow booking any service or employee, or just a specific one.
Group appointment bookings
Appointments do not always have to be individual – Amelia supports group bookings as well (e.g., for group excursions). Each service can have minimum and maximum capacity.
Automated notifications
Send e-mail & SMS notifications both to customers and employees – when an appointment is booked, pending, canceled, rejected, birthday greeting, appointment follow-up, and other.
Configure the gateway for sending email notifications that suits you best. You can choose between:
SMTP
standard PHP sendmail
Mailgun API
WP Mail
Global working hours, breaks and days off for the company
Enter your standard business hours, non-working days and bank holidays, and each new employee will have this schedule by default, which you can adjust individually later.
Stripe & Paypal payment system
The most popular payment system in the world supported out-of-the-box. Allow your customers to pay for their reservations via Stripe or Paypal payment system.
Multiple services and service categories
No matter how many different services do you provide, you can add all of them to Amelia, configuring individual duration, price, and other parameters.
Buffer time before and after service
Configure buffer time, required before and after the service, if the employees need some preparation before, or clean-up after an appointment.
Service Photo Galleries
Upload multiple pictures for service, to be shown on site’s front-end as service photo galleries/slideshows.
Support for Service Extras
Configure extra services, or special treatments provided additionally with a service, which can optionally raise the service price.
Book appointments from the back-end
If your customers book over the phone, you can quickly add their reservations to the database through the admin panel.
Create customer accounts from the back-end
While creating a new appointment, you can quickly create a new WordPress user account for the customer, so he could later book with it.
Manage your customers’ database
List your customers in a convenient filterable grid/list view. Sort by alphabet, or last visit.
Full financial details of the payments
A single database of all payments where you can check each payment status (finalized or pending), payment gateway (on-site, PayPal, Stripe), total amount, discount, and other information.
Discount coupons for bookings
Create and track usage of discount coupons – for all or some specific services, with a particular usage limit, a fixed amount discount or percentage.
Customizable design
Choose colors and fonts for the front-end elements to make the booking controls match your WordPress theme and corporate brand style.
User Roles and Permissions
Amelia has four built-in user roles: admin, manager, employee, and customer. Each role has its scope of permissions. Adjusting user permissions through WordPress’ native capabilities system is possible.
WebHooks
Connect Amelia with third party applications and send appointments and events data after each booking, canceling and/or rescheduling action.
GDPR Compliant
Amelia does not store any customers’ data in compliance with GDPR. In Amelia Customer Panel, your customers can access, manage, and delete their personal data at any point in time.
Amelia Customer Panel
Let your customers efficiently manage their appointments, events, and profile right on your website by instantly entering the amelia booking shortcode on a page. Customers can cancel or reschedule appointments without logging into WordPress.
Amelia Employee Panel
Let your employees manage their bookings without access to WordPress Dashboard, straight from the front-end page of you your website. Employees can log in and take control over their appointments and events, manage their schedule, working hours, days off and special days. Employees can manage price for their services, as well as the capacity.