If you take appointments, the booking form is where customers decide whether you are worth the trouble. Amelia is a WordPress plugin built for that job. This is what it does, which of its features actually remove work, and what it cost when we wrote this in August 2021.
What Amelia is
Amelia is an appointment and events booking plugin for WordPress. It lets clients make reservations and book meetings from your website, and pay online or offline.
It suits a range of businesses and industries because it is powerful without demanding much of the person setting it up.
What a booking system is worth
A booking system lets customers schedule appointments, bookings or reservations for any service an organisation provides, online or offline. Beyond the convenience for a customer, it is a route to lower expenses and better control of resources, which is where the operational saving comes from.
Automated scheduling lets an organisation manage bookings more efficiently than before, reducing waiting times and freeing capacity to provide other services at the same time.
A booking system also tends to produce more bookings, for an unglamorous reason: putting effort into a reservation tool that works is itself better service, and better service is what customers repeat.
A booking system a customer finds easy also makes them more comfortable spending money with you, more likely to recommend you, and more likely to say so publicly. If you take bookings continuously, the question is which system fits your business rather than whether to have one.
CustomerDo I need to call?
Cipher HexrunnerNo. The calendar can answer this one.
- The customer chooses a service and an available time on the website
- The appointment joins the relevant employee schedule and calendar
- Automated notifications carry status changes without a manual phone call
The features that remove work
Amelia has over 30 features in three groups — those that improve the customer’s experience, those that help a company manage appointments and events, and those that give a company more control over bookings and the information around them. The vendor’s full list is on the Amelia website; these are the ones that change how a day runs.
- Custom service schedules — set working hours and breaks separately for each service or each employee.
- Recurring appointments — let clients schedule daily, weekly or monthly repeats instead of rebooking.
- Google Calendar synchronisation — staff track their own appointments where they already look.
- Multiple locations — store contact data, address and geolocation for each of your sites.
- Automated notifications — email and SMS to clients and employees as an appointment changes status.
- Customer database — access it and filter alphabetically or by last visit.
- Customer panel — customers manage their profile and can schedule, cancel or reschedule without a WordPress login.
- Booking search — filters that let a client find the slot they actually want.
- Employee management — store contact details, track performance, manage workloads and set schedules and days off.
- Dashboard and reporting — the analytics view of how the business is performing.
- Service packages — bundle single or multiple services with a discount attached.
- Customisable design — match the fonts, colours and elements of your WordPress theme.
- Full payment detail — appointment status, payment gateway, total amount and discounts.
- User roles — four built-in roles for admin, manager, employees and customers, with adjustable permissions.
What it cost in August 2021
On that page, the Basic plan was US$59 for one domain a year, Pro was US$109 for three domains and marked as the best value, and Developer was US$249 for unlimited domains. All three included a year of premium support and monthly updates, and only Basic excluded packages of services. Those are 2021 prices.
Why the booking experience decides the sale
Amelia gives a business a professional, trustworthy feel without a large budget, and it lets an owner get on with the work instead of interrupting it to write an appointment down.
That matters more than it sounds. A positive experience on your website raises the chance a customer chooses you over a competitor. The reverse is just as strong: an experience that falls short costs the sale in front of you and the ones that would have followed it.
At Global Wizards we build online booking systems for a range of industries. Our review of SMS marketing tools covers the reminders side of the same problem, and our services page says what else we do.
If you want to talk about your own booking flow, contact us.
Frequently asked questions
What is the Amelia plugin?
Amelia is an appointment and events booking plugin for WordPress. It lets clients make reservations and book meetings from your website and pay online or offline, and it is built to be usable rather than configurable for its own sake.
What does an online booking system do for a business?
A booking system lets customers schedule appointments, bookings or reservations for whatever services an organisation provides, online or offline. Beyond the convenience, it is a way to cut expenses and control resources better, because automated scheduling reduces waiting times and lets a business run other services at the same time.
Which Amelia features matter most?
The ones that remove manual work: per-service and per-employee schedules, recurring appointments, Google Calendar synchronisation, automated email and SMS notifications, and multiple locations with their own contact and geolocation data. Together they take a booking out of somebody’s notebook.
Can customers manage their own bookings in Amelia?
Yes. The customer panel lets a customer manage their profile on your website and schedule, cancel or reschedule an appointment without logging into WordPress, and the search interface gives them filters to find what they want. That is the half of a booking system that reduces phone calls.
What did Amelia cost?
On the annual pricing page this article captured in August 2021, Basic was US$59 for one domain per year, Pro was US$109 for three domains, and Developer was US$249 for unlimited domains, each including a year of premium support and monthly updates. Those are 2021 prices, read from the screenshot published here and not rechecked.
Why does a good booking experience matter commercially?
A positive experience on your website raises the chance a customer chooses you over a competitor, and the reverse holds just as strongly: an experience that falls short of expectations costs sales and drives away people who would otherwise have arrived. A booking flow is one of the few places a customer judges a business before buying anything.
