You can allow your customers to cancel an order online via their account on the shop and/ or you can allow customers to change the date/ time of their booking online. This guide will run you through how you can allow customers to change the date or time of a booking themselves, so they no longer have to call you to move a booking.

This is set up separately from cancellation, you can allow one without the other.

What customers can change: the date and/or time of an existing booking.

What they cannot change: the offering itself (no swapping a massage for a facial), the number of guests, or adding anything to an existing order. Overnight packages are not included.

There are three things to set up:

Head to Settings > Shop settings > scroll to 'Features' > here you will see an option for "Enable customer rescheduling"...

If you toggle on "Enable customer rescheduling", this will mean you want to allow customers to reschedule the date or time of bookings online (where the item allows it). Another section will appear where you will have to select a "Reschedule refund policy" from the drop down menu. Your refund policy specifies how overpayments should be handled (eg. a customer moves from a more expensive time slot to a less expensive one).

Your options are:

Don't forget to scroll down and select "Save" to save your changes. (See Section 3 below for more information on each of these reschedule refund policy options)

Toggling on "Enable customer rescheduling" in shop settings only opens the door for rescheduling, customers cannot change anything until you also allow it on the individual offerings.

After enabling this in Shop settings, head to Settings > Appointment types / Session types / Area booking types / Table reservation types/ Packages > edit > 'Availability' tab.

Here there will be an option for Customer reschedule. The options from the drop down menu are:

If you select Allowed or Allowed if unpaid, an additional option appears for the latest customer reschedule time. This is how long before the booking starts a customer can still move it, set it to a number of hours or days, or choose None if you do not want to restrict it.

These fields are completely separate from Customer cancellation and the Latest customer cancellation time. Setting one does not set the other, so a site can allow changes but not cancellations, or the reverse.

Moving a booking can change its price, for example if the new day is priced differently as you have different pricing for weekdays compared to weekends.

If the new booking costs more, the customer pays the difference online as part of making the change. The change is only applied once that payment succeeds. This is the same whatever your refund policy is.

If the new booking costs less, what happens is decided by your Reschedule refund policy, set in your shop settings once you toggle on "Enable customer rescheduling".

If you select "Refund to voucher (automatic)", an additional section will appear where you have to select the "refund voucher type"; the cash voucher type refund vouchers are issued from...

There are three "Reschedule refund policy" options:

Two of these have requirements before you can save them:

If you use Refund to original payment method but the order was paid in a way that cannot be refunded automatically - a manual payment type, or a room charge posted to a PMS folio - the customer is shown the staff-handled message before they confirm, so they are never promised a refund the system cannot make.

To change a booking, the customer logs in to their account on the shop front, heads to the person icon, and selects the Orders tab. On the order they want to change, they select View and manage order...

There will be an Edit button on each item (if you have enabled the "Enable customer rescheduling" in shop settings)...

If an item cannot be changed online, when you select "Edit", it will let you know that it cannot be edited...

Selecting Edit on an item that can be edited, opens a date and time picker showing their current booking...

They pick a new slot from your live availability, all your normal booking rules apply, including availability, capacity, buffers, notice periods and allowed start times, so a customer cannot move themselves into a slot you would not have sold them in the first place.

Before they confirm, they are shown:

If the rescheduling leads to no price change, it will look like the below and the customer should select "Confirm reschedule" to update the booking...

If the rescheduling leads to an increase in price, it will look like the below. It will highlight the previous price compared to the new price so the customer can see what will be added to the order's outstanding balance. It will then have a "Continue to payment" button...

Once the customer selects "Continue to payment", the customer will be redirected to make the payment...

Once they enter their card details and select "Pay", they will be shown a message if their payment is successful letting them know "Your payment was received and your booking has been moved. A confirmation email is on its way"...

If the rescheduling leads to a decrease in price it will look like the below and will apply your rescheduling refund policy that you have selected in your shop settings. It will highlight the previous price compared to the new price so the customer can see what will need to be refunded/ transferred to voucher etc. The customer should select "Confirm reschedule" to update the booking.

If the rescheduling leads to the promo code that was applied to the item in the order no longer being valid then it will let the customer know by stating "The promo code no longer applies". It will then ask the customer to continue to payment so they can pay for the price difference...

The booking then shows at its new time in your calendar and on the order, the original slot is released, and the customer receives a confirmation email with the full order summary and what happened to the money.

When your customers head to the account section on the shop front, they'll see the "Edit" button next to the package...

When you click on "Edit", if you have set up rescheduling on the shop settings and for the individual package then this will mean the customer can reschedule online! A pop up will appear, they'll be able to move between dates and will have to select each package choice option...

Only once you have selected an option for each package choice then you will be able to select "Confirm reschedule"...

You will need to reselect the time for each choice before confirming the rescheduling because the system will need to check against any package rules i.e. the second choice might have to start exactly 2 hours after the first so the system will need to recheck if this is allowed.

For the package if you have a "Latest customer reschedule time" set, then the system will check this based on the earliest choice in the package to see if the reschedule is allowed.

When a customer reschedules their booking online, they will receive an email titled "Your booking has been rescheduled (Order ref)". You will be able to see the items in the order and the price. The wording in the email will depend on whether the rescheduling leads to no price change, an increase in price or a decrease in price.

In this example order it lets you know "Your payment of £10.00 for the difference in price has been received." because the customer will have had to have made the payment online when rescheduling their booking.

In this example order no additional details are required regarding payments/ refunds as no price change occurred.

In this example order it lets you know "The £10.00 difference has been issued as a new voucher, which will be emailed to the lead booker." The voucher is added as an item in the order so will appear in this confirmation email too but they will also receive another email containing the voucher code via the "Your gift voucher" email. This situation will happen for any bookings where the "Reschedule refund policy" is set to "Refund to voucher (automatic)".

In this example order it lets you know "Overpayment on your order: £10.00 Please contact us to arrange this with you." This is asking the customer to contact the site as this will be for any bookings where the "Reschedule refund policy" is set to "Handled by staff (manual)".

In this example order it lets you know "£10.00 is being refunded to your original payment method. Depending on your bank, this can take a few days to appear." This situation will happen for any bookings where the "Reschedule refund policy" is set to "Refund to original payment method (automatic)".

As mentioned when a booking is rescheduled, the customer will receive an email documenting this. There is no notification sent to the site when a booking is rescheduled, you can use the order audit though!

On the order in Trybe, in the audit, you'll be able to see if the customer has rescheduled. The user next to the action will be marked as "Unknown". See example below of a couples appointment that was rescheduled by the customer online...

If the package is rescheduled, you will see from the audit log it states that updates were made to the package but no exact details of what the changes were are provided...

If the change in date/ time for the item leads to an automatic refund (if you've set this as the behaviour in shop settings), then you will see this on the audit of the order too, see below...

If the change in date/ time for the item leads to a increase in the price, then you will see the customer paid for the reschedule listed in the audit of the order too, see below...