Amelia – Events & Appointments Booking WordPress Plugin

Going to a salon often requires an appointment. So does your favorite Thai restaurant or a visit to your dentist. In the past, customers used to go through the trouble of looking for an establishment’s phone number, talking to the concerned person, and then discussing the details of the appointment (often noted down on a piece of paper)! But those days are long gone.. 

The businesses have been given an exciting edge now that everything has moved online and can benefit from an online booking system as they allow customers to book appointments easily. You must find the best fit if you run a business requiring appointments and reservations. Thankfully, with WordPress, adding that kind of functionality is easy. You need a booking and appointments WordPress plugin that can help you with many customization options & settings and fully automate the booking process. That’s where Amelia WordPress Plugin can help, and we’re reviewing it in this article.

Here’s what we’ll cover:

• What is Amelia WordPress Plugin?
• Installation & Activation
• Features
• Pricing plans
• Is the Amelia WordPress plugin right for you?

What is WordPress, Amelia?

Amelia is a comprehensive event booking and appointment scheduling system. This plugin lets you turn any WordPress website into a fully functional appointment management system. Instead of hiring staff, you can use Amelia to automate the booking process and it actually reduces your total cost and eliminates any human errors. 

Amelia is a handy tool for small businesses and individuals that depend on stable appointment booking processes. It not only has one of the best interfaces on both the backend and frontend but also has a responsive design that looks great on smartphones, tablets, and desktops.

The free WordPress.org version available on WordPress.org has 10000+ active installations.

Important Links:

• Demos
• Pricing
• WPAmelia Website
• Documentation
• Support
  

Installation & Activation

1. You can download the zip file anytime from the TMS Store. After you purchase the plugin, the credentials will be sent to you in the email. 
2. Now, go to your WordPress Admin Dashboard > Plugins > Add New >Upload
3. Upload the zip file and click Activate. 
4. Your Purchase code that is necessary for auto updates and for contacting the support also can be found in TMS Store. 

Features

Amelia boasts many great features, including a step-by-step customer booking system and two-way synchronization support for Google Calendar to help employees manage their schedules. Let’s take a closer look at some of the features. 

1. Recurring appointments in Amelia Booking WordPress Plugin

With this feature, customers can repeat their appointments while choosing the date and time of the first appointment and defining the number of recurrences. For example, A customer may want to book a monthly salon appointment to avoid any waiting; you can enable the recurring appointments using the following steps- 

1. Click on the “ Add Service” in the services tab
2. Under Service details, you’ll see the “set recurring appointment.” 
3. By default, it is set as “disabled.”

One of the best things about this booking plugin is that it provides a lot of flexibility as far as the setting goes.

• “All” – This will enable daily, weekly, and monthly options for the customer.
• “Daily” –  With this option, a customer can schedule daily appointment recurrence. They can choose whether the appointment will repeat every day, every 2 days, every 3 days, etc.
• “Weekly”—This option allows customers to set up a weekly recurrence. They can choose whether an appointment will repeat every week, every two weeks, every three weeks, etc.
• “Monthly”—Customers can set up a monthly recurrence using this option by choosing whether the appointment will repeat every month, every two months, every three weeks, etc.

2. Events in Amelia WordPress Plugin

With Amelia, you can set events, as well as the recurring events for your business. It can be used for various occasions like tours, classes & sessions that recur over a period of time, conferences, or any company meeting. For example, if you run an online yoga class that runs on a weekly basis, you don’t have to do the tedious job of scheduling it every time. With this feature, you can just enable the “Recurring event” checkbox and fill in the details. 

3. Customer Panel in Amelia WordPress Booking Plugin

With this feature, the customer can make changes to their appointments or events. This allows the customer to track/ reschedule or cancel their bookings on the front end. On the Settings page, open the Roles Settings.  

In the “Role Settings you’ll see the Customer tab and the Enable Customer Panel’ option. 

When you enable the customer panel you can choose whether to let the customer edit their scheduling with the login or by sanding them token. One of the advantages of using this plugin is that it is in compliance with GDPR. If you enable option for customers to be able to delete their profiles, customers can do it with just a click. Amelia doesn’t store any data from your customers, the delete button will remove the data from your database. This is an added advantage, when a customer knows that a business is compliant with a certain set of regulations and they have an option to erase their personal information anytime they want, it builds a trust factor between the customer and the business and forms customer loyalty. On the other hand, if you do not want to allow your customers to delete their profile data, you can just disable this option. 

Amelia Front-end Customer Panel

4. Managing the Employee Panel in Amelia WordPress Booking Plugin

 This option is specifically for companies that have a lot of employees so to make it easier for them to manage the appointments. There must be at least one employee assigned for the plugin to work properly. You can either hide the employees from the frontend or display them anywhere on the website. 

Go to the Employees tab in Amelia WordPress Plugin and click on ‘Add Employee’. You can create the employees by filling in the details mentioned in the tab. 

Details: This section consists of general information about the employee, eg. First Name, Last Name, Email, etc. 

Assigned Services: In this tab, you can just check on the list of services you want to assign to the employee. 

With the shortcode you can place an front-end Employee Panel on the page of your website, set the password for your employee and this what employee can login and manage his/hers appointments and events, add new, set special days or days off, see the list of attendees of the events and many more.   

Amelia Front-end Employee Panel 

5. Zoom integration in Amelia WordPress Booking Plugin

Digitalization is changing the paradigm for changing times. It has changed the way of running a company forever and I think businesses must learn how to navigate through these changing times. Many people have started providing their services online. Not many WordPress booking plugins integrate with Zoom like Amelia does. With Amelia WordPress Plugin, you can provide video communication of your appointments and events. Taking the example of the Yoga class again, if you want to conduct an online yoga class, all you need to do is configure the Zoom application with this plugin. Once you’ve set up your Zoom Application, follow these steps:

• Go to the Zoom App marketplace by pasting https://marketplace.zoom.us/ in your browser.
• Hover over the ‘Develop’ section and click on the ‘Build App’ option. 
• You‘ll be redirected to the Create App page, choose the JWT option, give a name to your APP, and click create. 

• Now after you have filled out the basic information you’ll be directed to the credentials pages. Copy this information and paste it under Amelia Settings > Integrations > Zoom

• Just enter the Meeting title & agenda and click “Save”

You can also connect employees with the Zoom host. Just go to the employees page and open the employee details you want to integrate zoom with. Open the dropdown menu under “Zoom User” and you will see the user that you have created while creating the Zoom application.

You can also integrate the services with Zoom at the time of adding a New Service. Just click on the settings tab in the ‘Add New Service’ section and enable the ‘Zoom’ integration and click save. 

6. Web Hooks in Amelia WordPress Plugin

This setting allows you to add several hooks that will send the customer data to any other application, like any CRM platform. You can integrate other applications with Amelia using any automation tool. 

7. Notification Settings in Amelia WordPress Plugin

This feature allows you to send notifications to your customers and employees. One big advantage of this feature is that you have variations of notifications to choose from.The email templates are readily available and all you have to do is insert the variables.
For example, if you want to remind the customer about the upcoming appointment, all you have to do is select the template.

Pricing

The plugin comes in three Annual plans- Basic, Pro & Developer. Basic plan starts at $59 a year. Here’s a quick comparison between the annual plans.

You can also go for the Lifetime plans, that come in three options:

• Basic Lifetime: $189 (One domain, lifetime updates and support)
• Pro Lifetime: $389 (3 domains, lifetime updates and support)
• Developer Lifetime: $589 (unlimited domains, lifetime updates and support)

Check out the full details here https://wpamelia.com/pricing/

Is Amelia WordPress Booking Plugin right for you?

Now is the time to answer the most important question, whether this booking plugin is a good fit for you?  If your business relies on scheduled appointments or events to drive sales and generate revenue, then having a user-friendly booking plugin is crucial for your business. Amelia WordPress Plugin will help you stay on-track by streamlining appointment creation to generating notifications and integrating with business calendars. The intuitive, easy to use interface is the best part, that gives it an edge over other booking and appointment plugins. You don’t need any training to install and configure it. 

Our Verdict

Parameter	Rating
Features	4/5
Ease of Use	5/5
Support	5/5
Documentation	5/5
Value for money	5/5

• Overall 4.85 out of 5