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Getting started
Setting up your booking page
Everything that has to be true before your booking page can offer a single time, in the order worth doing it, and the settings that change how bookings behave.
Your booking page lives at bookodile.com/your-shop from the moment your
account exists. Whether it can actually offer a time depends on four things
being in place.
The four things a bookable time needs
- A service — something to book, with a duration and a price.
- Someone who can perform it — at least one active, bookable person assigned to that service.
- Working hours — for the business, and for that person.
- Room in the future — the time must clear your minimum notice and fall inside your maximum advance window.
Miss any one and your page loads perfectly and offers nothing. That is the most common "my booking page is broken" report, and it is almost never a fault.
Settings that change how bookings behave
These live in Booking settings and are not cosmetic — each one changes what is accepted.
| Setting | What it does |
|---|---|
| Minimum notice | Hours of warning you need. Set to 24 and today is gone. |
| Maximum advance days | How far ahead customers can book. Set to 30 and week six is unreachable. |
| Slot interval | The spacing of offered start times — 15 minutes offers 09:00, 09:15, 09:30. |
| Auto-confirm | On, bookings are confirmed instantly. Off, they arrive pending and nothing is agreed until you accept. |
| Cancellation window | Hours before the appointment during which customers can no longer cancel themselves. |
| Require email / require phone | Each is independent. Name is always required, and at least one of email or phone must stay on. |
| Show my business in search results | On by default, and the one setting here that sits on Website & booking page instead. Off takes your page out of our sitemap and asks search engines to leave it — and your Bookodile website — out. |
Contact details you collect
Name is always required. Email and phone are two independent switches, and you cannot turn both off — the settings page refuses to save. You need some way to reach the customer.
Both are enforced on your booking page and again by the booking API, so the requirement holds regardless of how the booking arrives.
Invoice and consent
Invoice details can be off, optional, or required. Set to required, your booking page will not submit without company name, street, city, postal code and country. Useful for rentals and anything B2B.
Worth knowing: that completeness check currently lives on the booking page itself. A booking created directly through the API can still omit invoice details even when the setting says required.
Consent can be switched on with your own wording and a link to your privacy policy, so the booking page asks for it in your terms rather than ours.
Reminders
Reminders can go out the day before, two hours before, or both. They are on a per-business setting and go to the customer.
A sensible order to do this in
- Set your business working hours first — everything narrows from there.
- Add your services with realistic durations and buffers.
- Add people, set their own hours, and assign them to services.
- Set booking settings — minimum notice is the one people get wrong.
- Open your own booking page in a private window and book something. It is the only way to see what customers see.
Worked example
A new barbershop: open 09:00–18:00 Tuesday to Saturday, one barber, a 30-minute cut at €20, 15-minute slot interval, 2 hours minimum notice, auto-confirm on, email required and phone optional.
That is a complete, working booking page. Everything else — branding, add-ons, deposits, reminders — is refinement on top of a page that already takes bookings.
Being found on Google
Your booking page is listed in search engines from the start — there is nothing to switch on. Three things make that possible:
- your page is included in
bookodile.com/sitemap.xml, which tells search engines it exists rather than waiting for them to stumble on a link; - the page carries your business name, your own description (the one from Business settings — it is used as the search snippet, so it is worth writing) and your address;
- when your page is first listed, changes how it appears in results (its name, description, address, language, phone, website or logo) or is taken out, Bing and the other search engines that support IndexNow are told within minutes, instead of finding out the next time they read the sitemap.
In practice, pages found this way come up when somebody searches for your business by name. That is the query worth winning: someone who already knows you and is looking for a way to book.
To keep your page out, go to Settings → Website & booking page and, beside your page's address, turn off Show my business in search results. The same switch covers your Bookodile website, so both are left out together. Your page keeps working exactly as before and anyone with the link can still book — it simply stops being listed.
Two honest caveats. Search engines decide for themselves what to show and when, so nobody can promise a position or a date. And turning the setting off is a request, not a delete: a page already listed usually takes a few weeks to drop out.
Limits
- Search listing is not a search ranking. Being in the sitemap means search engines know your page exists. Whether it appears, and where, is theirs to decide — we have no control over it and neither does anyone else.
- Working hours, services and people are per branch. A second location starts with copies and diverges from there.
- Nothing is bookable without an assigned person, even for a business of one — you are a bookable person on your own roster.
- Changing settings never rewrites existing bookings. Narrow your hours and yesterday's bookings stay where they are.