BTA: Appointment Booking App

We have been using BTA to manage our rental store for about 1 year now. We ship rental products to our customers and they return the products after their rental period.

This application is excellent. The integration with Shopify is super easy. The initial setup and then the integration of new products is extremely quick and smooth. You can add an individual lead time and a lag time for each product. This is especially important for us as we have to take shipping times into account when managing our inventory. You can also add different locations etc. wich are not using since we are shipping our products.

The customer interface looks great and booking is very intuitive. It is also very easy to make manual bookings.

After a booking you get an email with an ics file that you can add to your Outlook calendar for example. You also have a calendar in the backend.

The customer service is excellent. They will help you extremely quickly, which is very important because you will get disappointed customers and lose a lot of money if your booking system goes down. They will also help you with very specific problems and go to great lengths to find a solution. They will never leave you alone with a problem.

The pricing is also fair. I think in the past there was no booking limit that came with your plan. But considering the value BTA provides to our small business, I think all pricing levels are still more than OK.

The only thing on my wish list is a better calendar in the backend. A few small adjustments would be extremely helpful from my perspective.

1. Include the option to include/exclude lead time and lag time in the appointments. Currently, the calendar only shows the booking appointment itself + the lag time. In our case, the lead time reflects the time we need to ship our product to our customers. If we could include this information in our calendar, we would know when to ship the product to our customer from our calender.

2. Custom color coding for the appointments. It would be great if we could change the color of the appointments. Then we would have a better overview of the events. In our case it could look like this:
blue - confirmed booking
red-shipment initiated
purple-product at customer
green - product back in stock.

3. Synchronization with Outlook calendar (the others are more important)

These small changes would make inventory management easier and more convenient.

However, it is by far the best solution we have tested so far. We are very happy with it. Easy to use, good interface, perfect support, fair pricing.
Thank you BTA team
We love you
Tom

Welcome to the most in depth review ever written. HA! I kid.

Firstly, if you've got appts, rentals, etc to book - you know my pain. It's SO lovely to have it all tied into Shopify, but choosing the right app is OVERWHELMING with A. so many apps and B. SO many with good ratings.

I'm a super type A gal who created a whole spreadsheet trying to organize the madness as I tested. I looked outside of Shopify as well - and other platforms are ultimately complicated and I'd rather have it tied into Shopify. I searched and searched and went with BTA about 3 years ago. My business expanded this year and my circumstances got a little too complicated for their app - but guess what... it was also too complicated for EVERY other app I SPENT 40 HOURS TESTING, RESEARCHING, ETC. So take my word for it... Overall, I think BTA's features are very robust, possibly one of the most robust apps out there, and they are very helpful. There's one I think that would go toe to toe with, but the price point of that competitor is 4X that of BTA, so why bother?

BTA is really helpful with customer service. The only struggle is sometimes it's really hard to explain everything via email and there's some disconnects - but eventually we all get it together. There's some disgruntled folks in these reviews and I can say.... I'm not always the most patient person... and I think at the end of the day, they'll match your energy. If you get irritated and short with them, when all they really are trying to do is help, you'll have a sub par experience. Try to take a breathe and know they really do want to help.

In 3 years, I only had one glitch that caused some booking troubles. They got to it as fast as they could. Of course, I wanted it fixed IMMEDIATELY, but, being part owner in a tech company, I know it takes time to figure out a bug and implement a solution. Even instagram and Amazon go down, we can't expect perfection - but one glitch in 3 years is pretty dang good!

Finally, if you are a design nerd like me... you might be fooled by a few other app options that just look soooo cool and pretty. haha. Trust me, the functionality is just not there. I feel bad mentioning this, but I want this to be an honest review. Plus, I know it is a selling point for a lot of people - myself included. I almost switched because another app was prettier. At the end of the day, it just wasn't QUITE up there with BTA.

At the end of the day, I choose BTA for functionality, price and the fact that I have weird booking circumstances and they walked me through setting things up to finagle it to work for my needs. With an app SO robust, there's bound to be confusion - it's not like we customers wrote the code! I say this because you will have questions... probably lots of them, and they WILL be there for you, as a partner.

IF YOU WANT MORE SPECIFIC FINDINGS FROM MY SEARCH:

- BTA allows you to create booking fields and it's more customizable than any other app I've seen in this regard (again, one other goes toe to toe, but for 4x the price)
- BTA's notifications are robust and better than most... and it's included in the price! Other apps have you alter liquid theme files and I hate doing that personally.
- The bookings calendar and elements are customizable and you have more options with how to display things than with other apps
- Their customer RESCHEDULE/CANCELLATION FEATURE IS PURE GOLD! Many apps do not have this.
- I like that they have a different website login so I don't have to pay for a bunch of staff users on shopify - they can login there to check customers in, etc. Other apps all have them log in to shopify which I don't like for a number of reasons, one being the cost.
- The multiple ways you can set your hours, blackouts, etc makes it really great for complex calendar/availability situations.
- Once you get a few products set up, it's really easy to go from there.
- I wouldn't waste your time poking around if you're confused - out of the gate just shoot BTA an email and give them your specific user case with as much detail and honestly just let them tell you what you need - you'll save yourself a lot of time.

These 5 stars are given wholly to Book That App's tech support team, with sincere gratitude.

Upon my recent migration to a new Shopify theme, I suddenly found myself with a number of severe calendar and booking-related issues happening all at the same time. These were big, visible customer-facing problems that urgently needed to be addressed and had me feeling helpless. I had troubleshot for days and hours before finally reaching out to the team, jaded due to past experiences with other platforms’ customer service. Simply put, I was skeptical that help would arrive and didn’t want to get my hopes up. There's nothing quite so unnerving as needing immediate assistance and having no idea if and when your web-form-submitted pleas for help will catch anyone's attention or get a reply. It always feels a bit like throwing a message in a bottle into the ocean, hoping it will reach someone, but never knowing if or when it will.

Finally, after another full day of troubleshooting, I submitted several support request tickets late in the evening as a last resort. It was after 10 pm, so I had accepted that I'd be going to bed unsettled and anxious, and waking up to who-knows-how-many confused customers the next morning. But then, like a beacon of light coming out of the sky, I started receiving real, human feedback and assistance immediately! Albert's late PM hour responses to my SOS literally felt like having a life raft thrown to me. He jumped on my cases immediately, and by the time I did head to bed, 2 out of 3 of my issues were fixed, if not well on their way to being fully resolved. The next day, Rob picked up seamlessly where Albert left off, and guided me the rest of the way to complete resolution.

To get to interface with one exceptional tech support rep alone is rare, so to be able to benefit from the combined efforts of such a talented team was nothing short of outstanding. Even for its faults, I will no longer be getting angry at my Book That App software if and when I encounter roadblocks or issues I can’t figure out, knowing now that their dedicated tech support team is as responsive, diligent and thorough as they are, and completely accessible to me at my fingertips. Thank you guys, you really are such an asset to your company, but even more importantly, to the people whose small businesses and livelihoods rely on your product every day.

Gratefully,
Kristin