Zoe Booking

Zoe Booking turns your WordPress site into a complete booking system in about five minutes. Add services and staff, drop the form on any page, and start taking appointments — free reservations, hosted online payments or the WooCommerce checkout.

Three ways to take bookings

• Standalone — instant reservations (confirmed automatically or pending your approval). No other plugin needed.
• Standalone — pay online — customers pay on a hosted checkout (Square built in; Stripe and PayPal come with the PRO add-on). The booking is created only after the payment is verified server-side; if the slot was taken while paying, the charge is refunded automatically.
• WooCommerce (PRO add-on) — bookings ride through the cart and checkout as products, with prefilled customer details.

A booking form people enjoy using

• Four friendly steps: service → date & time → details → confirm, with a live price summary.
• Five layouts (sidebar with photo, numbered process timeline, top stepper, slim progress bar, icon rail) and five design skins (Classic, Minimal outline, Soft, Dark, Glass).
• Popup mode — show just a button, the form opens in an elegant modal.
• Calendar days fill up visually as they get booked; time slots show remaining group spots.
• Phone field with a country dial-code picker, validated email, optional customer notes.
• Dedicated Elementor widget — layout, design skin, colours, typography, spacing and the sidebar photo are all editable straight in the Elementor panel. A Gutenberg block and the [ms_booking] shortcode render the same form everywhere else.
• A service catalogue with [ms_services] or its own Elementor widget: your services as cards (photo, description, duration, price) in list, grid or large-card layouts, with optional category filters, search and sorting — and a Book button that opens the form on that service.
• 12 or 24-hour time, any currency symbol and position, renameable terminology (Service → Class, Person → Coach…), single-person mode.

Run the business, not the admin

• A visual month calendar with colour-coded bookings, day panel and one-click manual bookings.
• A bookings list tinted by status, with print-ready details sheets, one-click deletes and a CSV export of whatever your filters select.
• A dashboard with 30-day revenue, bookings, average value and cancellation-rate charts.
• Emails with .ics calendar invites, automatic reminders, and a QR code customers scan to drop the appointment into their phone’s calendar.

Feature switchboard

Every capability has an on/off switch under Zoe Booking → Features, so the plugin stays exactly as light as you need: duration variants, taxes, online meeting links, service extras, group appointments, recurring series, per-staff calendar feeds, online payments, QR add-to-calendar, WhatsApp links and the customer panel.

Events & tickets (PRO add-on)

Events (workshops, openings, concerts) with a ticket pool, image and description — sold through any booking mode and displayed with the Events widget or [ms_events] shortcode in list, grid or standard layouts. An event can run on one date or on many: a workshop series stays a single event, customers choose their date at checkout, and every date sells its own seats. Events are not tied to anyone’s working hours, so a date in a quiet month needs no schedule juggling.

Customer panel

A front-end account area with passwordless magic-link sign-in: customers see their appointments and tickets, cancel online, download invoices, edit their details — and exercise their GDPR rights (export or permanently delete their data) themselves. [ms_customer_panel] or the Elementor widget.

Free vs Premium

The free plugin is complete on its own: unlimited services and staff, the full booking form (all layouts, skins and popup mode), the visual month calendar, the bookings list and the dashboard, Square online payments, email notifications and reminders, .ics calendar invites, QR add-to-calendar, per-staff calendar feeds, taxes, duration variants, service extras, group appointments, recurring series, WhatsApp links, online-meeting links, the customer panel and full translations.

Zoe Booking PRO (a separate add-on, not included in this plugin) adds: Stripe & PayPal payments, WooCommerce checkout, discount coupons, waiting lists, multiple locations, invoices, refunds and events & tickets.

External services

Zoe Booking runs entirely on your own site and stores all data in your WordPress database. It connects to external services only when you enable the corresponding feature and add your own API keys:

• Stripe (api.stripe.com) — when Stripe is your payment gateway: creating checkout sessions, verifying payments and issuing refunds. Data sent: booking amount, currency, item name and the customer’s email. Terms, Privacy.
• PayPal (api-m.paypal.com) — when PayPal is your gateway: creating and capturing orders and issuing refunds. Data sent: amount, currency, item name. Terms, Privacy.
• Square (connect.squareup.com) — when Square is your gateway: creating payment links, verifying orders and issuing refunds. Data sent: amount, currency, item name, buyer email. Terms, Privacy.

The optional WhatsApp feature only renders standard wa.me links — no data is transmitted until the user taps the link.

• zoebooking.com (our own licensing service) — used only for the optional PRO license. Activating or re-checking a PRO license key sends that key and your site’s hostname to zoebooking.com to verify it; nothing is sent while no key is entered, and no third-party script is ever loaded. The “Get PRO” admin page simply links to our website. With an activated key, the optional “Install PRO now” button downloads the PRO package you purchased from zoebooking.com (the request carries only your license key) and installs it — nothing is ever downloaded without that explicit click. Terms, Privacy.

Nothing else calls home: the QR code renderer and the flag font ship inside the plugin.