Review: YouCanBook.Me appointment booking system
Recently while doing some work for an upcoming contract, I required a booking system which integrated with Google Calendar. Initially I found a service called Appointy, which would have fitted the bill, except that it wasn’t possible for people visiting the website to book appointments without having to log in via creating an Appointy account or login in with Facebook; at least not with the free account. So my search continued and I found YouCanBook.Me, which I have been very impressed with; no login to book appointments and highly customizable, even with the free package.
The amount of settings available in the free version is quite astonishing, almost too much functionality, if you can live with a “Powered for FREE by YouCanBook.Me” button at the bottom of your page, there really is no need to upgrade to a paid package. The first thing you’ll need to do is link your Google account to You Can Book Me, then set up a subdomain yourname.youcanbook.me. all other settings are optional; such as title, logo and descriptive text above the booking interface.
YouCanBook.Me also allows for setting of working days & hours, default appointment length, minimum notice (time from now when appointments can be booked, for example, if now is 9am; the next bookable appointment slot will be 12pm, if the setting was set at 3 hours along with a maximum booking time in the future, so users can’t book more than the specified time in the future.
The booking information form can be fully customised with whatever fields you want and can be 100% controlled by CSS to style it up to match your website. It doesn’t inherit your website’s CSS because the booking system is displayed within an iFrame, but pasting your website CSS fixes that!
After submitting a booking; it takes you to your customised thank you page, which can say whatever you want, although links are not allowed. At that time, it can Email you, the person who booked the appointment and you can customise how you want your booking to appear in Google calendar.
Finally, you can customise just about every aspect of how your page looks; from adding a header and footer, choose from a selection of themes to match your website, change the colours, fonts and finally CSS as I mentioned previously. This is only a brief overview of what You Can Book Me has to offer, visit their website at youcanbook.me for more information and sign up if you wish!
Examples of YCB.me in use: Date/Time Picker — Information Input — Confirmation Page
Date/Time Picker
Information Input
Confirmation Page
Thanks for posting! In 2014, we should see more businesses offering online booking. It’s just good customer service! Not to mention businesses save time and money, automate, and stay organized. Here at *snip* (this site is not a link farm), we’ve seen how businesses can grow by increasing their local exposure and offering online booking.
I do not recommend! My school used this site to schedule conferences during conference week. A few days before, our accounts were locked out and the links to our booking sites disabled, with no explanation. Worse, there was no way to contact a customer service rep or reset the accounts because we couldn’t log in! We had to quickly apologize to the parents and reschedule. Horrible experience.