If you’ve been struggling to find an appointment booking plugin with a simplified user interface for your service-based website, Amelia is an alternative plugin that’s worth your consideration.
There are several free and premium appointment booking plugins available on WordPress with various features. But, most of these plugins can only be managed by developers and experienced users.
There was always a need for an appointment booking plugin with a beginner-friendly user interface that allows anyone to manage bookings and appointments without having expert WordPress knowledge. Amelia aims to fill that void.
In this review, we take a closer look at the WordPress appointment booking plugin, Amelia, to see if it’s really as good as it claims to be. Keep reading to find out our verdict.
What Is Amelia?
Amelia dubs itself as an “enterprise-level WordPress appointment booking plugin”, mostly because of its wide range of advanced features and simplified functions geared toward service-based websites and businesses.
The plugin aims to make appointment booking a simple process for customers and also make things easier for business owners to manage their clients and customers. With the plugin, you can offer a simple step-by-step process for booking appointments instead of the conventional methods that involve a lot of filling forms.
Amelia is a powerful and beginner-friendly appointment booking plugin that’s suitable for many different types of business websites.
What Makes It Different?
One of the biggest issues with making appointment systems on WordPress websites is that they were a bit complicated to manage for ordinary users. As a result, you always had to keep an assistant to check on your appointments and sync them to your daily schedule.
Amelia offers a solution to this issue by automating most of the tasks involved with booking systems. The plugin actually automates many of the basic functions so that you rarely have to login to WordPress admin dashboard.
For example, Amelia automatically synchronizes the appointments made by your customers with your Google Calendar. This helps you stay on top of your schedule at all times. It also sends email notifications to both you and your employees so that you know when to expect the next customer.
Beginner-Friendly Dashboard
The beginner-friendly user interface is what makes Amelia truly wonderful. Each time you click on the Amelia plugin tab on your WordPress admin dashboard, it will show your a visualized breakdown of all the stats related to your appointment system.
It will show you how many appointments are pending approval, how much revenue you’ve generated with appointments, which services were booked the most, the appointments scheduled for the day, and much more.
Create Different Booking Systems
Amelia is comes with a versatile booking system and a front-end design that allows the plugin to adapt to many different kinds of businesses. This allows you to use Amelia to create booking and appointment systems for gyms, salons, private clinics, service and repair centers, coaching centers, law consultants, and other service-based websites.
However, Amelia may not be suitable for more advanced and large businesses, like hotels and real estate websites. While you can add custom fields to the booking forms, it lacks different styles of pre-made booking form templates and integration with product pages on a website like rooms or real estate property options.
Process Payments With WooCommerce Integration
Amelia also integrates with WooCommerce. This enables you to process payments via the booking system using either PayPal or Stripe for accepting credit cards.
This is a useful function, especially for consulting and service-based businesses. Because the plugin is smart enough to help you not only process payments but also to handle taxes and invoices as well.
Sync With Google Calendar
Getting an email notification whenever someone books an appointment through the booking system is great, but then you have to copy all the details onto your work schedule. And, most of the time it’s easy for a notification to get lost in your inbox.
This used to be a problem for small businesses, especially for solopreneur consultants. Amelia offers an easy solution to this by automatically syncing appointments with your Google Calendar.
Support For Group Appointment Bookings
Group appointments are common in many businesses. Most people want to bring their friend to the spa or yoga class with them. But, when using most website booking systems you have to make multiple bookings just to include that friend with you.
When booking an appointment with Amelia, it asks users whether they’re bringing more people with them. It allows customers to make group appointments without having to make separate bookings. Although, it’s not sophisticated enough to be used as a system for booking rooms or for travel services.
Send Email Notifications
In addition to syncing appointments with your Google Calendar, Amelia will also send you email notifications on new, pending, and canceled bookings.
The customers will receive notifications when an appointment is rejected and they’ll also receive reminders and follow-up emails on their appointments as well. All of which are fully automated. You don’t have to send them manually.
How It Works
Setting up Amelia is also quite easy.
After installing the plugin, Amelia will show up as a separate tab on your WordPress admin dashboard. Clicking on it will open the Amelia dashboard with all the stats related to your booking system.
You can start setting up the appointment system by first creating an Employee. This will be the person in charge of handling the appointments. It could be your assistant or yourself.
Then go to the Services page and create a service that you offer.
You can also customize the look and feel of the booking system via the Customize page. The system supports custom fields for collecting more details from your clients as well.
From the Email Notifications tab, you can customize the emails reminders sent to your customers.
From the Settings page, you can setup payment methods, integrate with Google Calendar, manage email notifications, and much more.
Finally, you can use the Amelia booking shortcode to embed the appointment booking system anywhere on your website.
Once you start receiving appointments, you’ll be able to manage them via the Appointments and Calendar tabs.
Amelia plugin website offers a detailed getting started guide with video tutorials on how to setup each function as well. Use the guide to learn more about how to setup different types of features.
Pricing Plans
Unlike other subscription-based plugins, Amelia comes with a simple pricing plan. You just pay a one-time fee of $59 and you get to use the plugin for the rest of your life with unlimited plugin updates.
Should You Buy It?
The beautiful dashboard design, ease of use, multipurpose functionality, and automation features make Amelia a one of a kind appointment booking plugin. It also does a great job of providing an improved user experience thanks to its simplified step-by-step appointment booking wizard. All of these features make Amelia a great choice for a service-based website.
However, if you’re looking for a booking system for a hotel, travel, or real estate website, there are other options worth looking into.
If you’re interested in Amelia, you can test-drive the plugin features and functions using its demo sites and see how it works yourself.
