New online booking wizard - provisional bookings, deposit and online payment
If you're taking online reservations a big thing you care about is making sure your customers show up! Normally you will do this by taking either credit card details or a payment, as part of the online reservation process.
When you set up your online booking wizard, you have a choice about how you go about this.
here are your options:
- Just take & hold credit card details. Using Stripe in credit card vault mode, you can get customers to store credit card details. Then if they don't show (already less likely) you could charge them a 'no-show' fee. Furthermore you will still have their credit card details in Stripe, so you can now use it for Security Deposit. It doesn't take payment at this stage - only stores card details.
- take payment. Using Stripe you take full or partial payment you can request payment for the rental.
The choice will depend entirely on your business and we can talk you through your various options during the on-boarding process.
What about people who don't enter credit card details online ?
(when you ask them to)
So we're often asked about the following scenario. Say you set up your shop to take credit card details, or even full payment. What about if a customer makes a reservation, but doesn't actually succeed with the credit part entry part?
In this case, we take a provisional booking. Provisional (or pending) meaning the inventory is reserved, you have a reservation but the status of provisional (pending) reflects the fact that we're not 100% sure it will go ahead.
But you don't need to tell your customer about provisional bookings!!
sending a provisional email is optional. If you don't want to tell them (to give them the false impression they are done) then simply don't send that email.
- you can of course customise the content of these emails:
for example:
"thank you for putting these items in your basket - please note we can only secure your booking when we have received a credit card / payment etc"
To not send provisional emails simply uncheck this box, in settings->online
Why do we do it like this?
we do it like this because we listened to you, our users and that is what you told us. Don't forget there are reasons why you still want the reservation in there - albeit with this provisional status:
- the customer may have wanted to pay, but got distracted finding credit card
- the card was denied or some other technical hitch occurred.
So, if you get a provisional with no credit card information:
- contact your customer and ask if they are still coming to rent their bikes.
- if you don't hear back - simply cancel
Auto-cancellation of provisionals.
(as of 17/5/2016)
you can now set your Online Bookings to auto-cancel any provisional bookings. (ie people who can't / won't pay for whatever reason) This means it will automatically free up your inventory. But you will still have the cancelled reservation so you can contact the client.