Appointments: accept customer location

[TropicWeave]

Hi.

I allowing a client to select their location for a Service Appointment, how can I limit the distance from my office?

Can I set a maximum radius or a set of accepted localities?

With an office in Hobart, Tasmania, I would not want to be accepting appointments for Perth & certainly not from any random place in the World, though somewhere tropical & beachy might be nice 🙂 

I may accept appointments in southern Tasmania.

Thanks, Peter.

[Seamus]

Hey @TropicWeave,

Thanks for getting in touch!

I took a look into this one - there's currently no way to limit where a customer is located when make a booking, though I get that this would be very handy if you are travelling to your customers rather than them travelling to you!

I'd say the best way around this at the moment is to make it clear on the Appointments homepage that you can only accept appoints in given post codes or suburbs. You can set your appointments to needing to be approved by yourself before they're confirmed - I'd say this is currently the best way to make sure you're not receiving bookings from places you're not able to travel to.

We are looking at expanding the functionality of Appointments in a number of ways though, to better accommodate more business types and ways of doing business than Appointments is currently set up to do. I'm passing your feedback on our team for consideration!

[TropicWeave]

Thanks Seamus.

Glad to help push the boundaries 🙂

At the moment anyone around the World could book an appointment, even if the Welcome page spells out the service range in text.

I'm aware of the Confirmation setting. It just seemed a little like an inhibition for clients to book if they have to wait for me to get back to them - sort of the breaks the 24-hour instant gratification of knowing a booking has been made.

Perhaps as an enhancement some options may be:

# within country

# within State

# within city/locality

# within radius (for a few websites I've had to code the spherical geometry for distance between postcodes to find 'nearest shop' - fun maths!)

# within a set of zip/postcodes

I imagine the first 2 options are pretty easy, and the others require more extensive back-end work. The last perhaps puts it in the hands of the shop owner.

Thanks for your help, Peter.

[Seamus]

Hey @TropicWeave,

I've passed your feedback up the chain! I can't make any guarantees as to if and when this feature may be implemented, but I have shared it with our Australian product manager, who is passing your use case on to the rest of the appointments team.