Amelia Lite is a free WordPress appointment booking plugin that allows you to set up a fully-featured automated booking system on your website. It’s a great tool for small businesses and individuals who rely on consistent appointment scheduling.

On both the front-end and back-end, Amelia Lite was developed with the most up-to-date Enterprise-level technology, ensuring a seamless and sleek user experience. Amelia elements use a single-page-app approach, which means they don’t require page reloading, and they were all created with the mobile first concept in mind, which means all of the admin and customer interfaces are fully responsive.

Amelia Lite supports

•  Adding the [ameliabooking] shortcode to create a step-by-step booking view
• General Settings (https://wpamelia.com/general-settings/) are used to configure the company’s general settings.
• Calendar Admin View(https://wpamelia.com/admin-calendar/)   is a useful back-end Calendar view that provides a complete overview of all appointments and statuses.
• Appointments Admin Page (  https://wpamelia.com/admin-appointments/) ) is a flexible appointment management page with the ability to add appointments by your personnel from the WordPress admin dashboard.
• Configuring the provider’s information and schedule – General Settings
• Dashboard – Dashboard page (https://wpamelia.com/admin-dashboard/)
• When the appointment status changes, email notifications are sent to both the consumer and the provider.

What Are the Features Inside Amelia?

Amelia has a variety of characteristics, some of which are listed here.

SMS Notifications

SMS alerts, in addition to email notifications, allow you to send SMS messages to your clients and workers to inform them of upcoming appointments or events. When it comes to emails, you can send them at three distinct times: immediately after an event is triggered, at the scheduled defined time after the appointment/event, and at the scheduled stated time of day.

Custom Service Schedule

Employees are individuals who provide a service in the Amelia WordPress Booking Plugin. For the plugin to function effectively, at least one employee must be established. This option is designed for businesses with multiple employees to make it easier for them to maintain and track their appointments, availability, and services. Don’t worry if you only have one employee and don’t want their name to appear on the top pages. When you only create one employee, the front-end booking form will automatically hide it.

Special Days

You can use this option to designate one or more days on which your employee will work different hours and/or perform different services. Whether you need to set shorter or longer working hours for a single day or a period of time, or create a separate service for a single day or a week, you can accomplish it all here. 

It will override the employee’s normal working hours and service schedule once you’ve set it up, but not the days off. New options will display when you click the “Add Special Day” button. Choose a date or a range of dates in the Date option, then set one or more periods of time with working hours and one or more services for each of them in the Serv option.After you’ve finished configuring the customized schedule, click the “Save Special Day” button to save it.

This feature is for you if you have services that are only supplied on occasion (not on a daily or weekly basis). Simply remove the business hours and only use the special days, and the front-end calendar will display the first available appointment time. This is especially beneficial for services that occur on a regular basis. Customers will not have to look for a date. Rather, the month with the available date will be displayed first.

Schedule Recurring Appointment

The Recurring Appointments feature allows your customers to book a repeating appointment by selecting the day and time for the initial appointment, as well as the type of recurrence and the number of repeated appointments, all in one booking process.

Custom Fields for Booking Form

The Custom Fields feature allows you to add more fields to your booking form in order to tailor it to your specific company needs. The customer’s first and last name, email address, and phone number are all included by default, but you may add more fields using the Custom Fields feature if you want to ask a question, collect additional personal information, or for any other purpose.

These fields will appear on the Booking form under the default fields for appointments, and if your customer fills them out, the information will be displayed in the back-end appointment information.When it comes to events, custom fields will appear in the same position on the front-end booking form as they do for appointments, but when it comes to the back-end, custom fields will appear when you open the Attendees list and click on any attendee. When you click on an attendee in the list, the option “Edit attendee” appears, and when you click on it, the custom fields appear.

WooCommerce Integration

The WooCommerce integration’s main benefit is that it lets you use their payment channels, send invoices, and charge taxes for your services. To make this integration work, you’ll need a WooCommerce product that acts as a bridge between WooCommerce and the Amelia Booking Plugin. 

Visit their official website to learn more about Amelia’s characteristics.

Why Should You Use Amelia?

There are numerous advantages to using Amelia. One of them is the chance to improve your company’s professional image. Amelia doesn’t require any training to use, and it only takes a few minutes to set up. As a result, it’s simple to try it out and see how it works for you and your team.”

How to Install Amelia?

You only need to follow these instructions to install this plugin

1. First, either use WordPress’ built-in plugins browser to find the plugin, upload the ZIP file using WP Admin, or FTP the Amelia Lite folder to your WordPress’ plugins folder on the server.
2. Activate the plugin in your WordPress installation’s “Plugins” page.
3. Enjoy!

How to Use Amelia?

How Much Does it Cost?

• Basic: $59 (1 domain/year)
• Pro: $109 (3 domain/year
• Developer: $249 (unlimited domains/year)

How and Where Can You Pay Amelia?

Customers can pay Amelia in a variety of ways. Here’s how to make a PayPal payment. Customers can pay for appointments directly through PayPal (with a debit/credit card or a PayPal balance). You must first enable the “PayPal service,” after which you can choose whether to utilize PayPal in sandbox mode or live mode.

To use the Live mode, copy your PayPal account’s “Live Client ID” and “Live Secret” and paste them into Amelia Settings/Payments/PayPal. PayPal’s “Sandbox Mode” is a testing environment that is designed to imitate the live PayPal production environment and should only be used for testing.

Simply follow the steps below to configure your PayPal Sandbox:

1. Go to My Account – PayPal Developer
2. Click on “My Apps & Credentials” in the “Dashboard” option on the left.
3. You must create a new app under the “REST API apps” area (or use the existing one),
4. Then, on the Sandbox PayPal Payment Settings page of the plugin, copy the values from the fields “Client ID” and “Secret.”

Pros

• Has a booking feature
• The developers are highly proactive 
• Works flawlessly
• The presentation is appealing
• The online calendar is easy to see

Cons

• Some settings are lacking
• The ability to present offers is missing
• The plugin’s intended usage is limited
• No white labeling when utilize for clients

Conclusion

Amelia is a simple yet powerful automated booking specialist that works 24 hours a day, 7 days a week to ensure that your customers may book appointments or events online and pay while you sleep! This plugin is ideal for law firms, gyms and sporting events, private clinics, spa salons, repair shops, beauty salons, and a variety of other businesses. Amelia’s pricing starts at $59 per user, per year, and there is no free trial.

References

• Pricing – Amelia WordPress Booking Plugin (wpamelia.com)
• Amelia Demo Sites – Amelia WordPress Booking Plugin (wpamelia.com)
• Amelia – Events & Appointments Booking Calendar – WordPress plugin | WordPress.org
• Amelia – WordPress Appointment and Event Booking Plugin (wpamelia.com)
• Amelia – Events & Appointments Booking Calendar – WordPress plugin | WordPress.org