Garden centres: booking garden advice appointments online

Offer garden advice as bookable appointments rather than questions caught on the shop floor: a short in-store consultation with photos and measurements, and a longer home visit for customers who want advice on site. Open in-store slots at quieter hours, say in the description what to bring, and plan home visits by area. Customers get your full attention for planting plans, lawns or problem plants, and your staff aren't pulled away from the tills at the busiest moment.

An in-store consultation works for choosing plants for a border, a balcony or a hedge, from photos and a few measurements. A home visit suits bigger projects, poor soil or sick plants that need to be seen. On Book, each service has a name, a price and an optional description shown on your public page, and each slot belongs to one service, sits within one day and has its own capacity.

Durations and prices are examples: set your own. Say whether a home visit fee is deducted from plants ordered afterwards.

The booking form takes first name, last name, email and phone, plus an optional note that reaches you in the new booking email and appears in the customer's calendar file. Ask in each description for:

For plant health checks, ask customers to bring a cutting or leaf in a sealed bag rather than a whole infested plant, to protect your stock.

Spring weekends are when the shop floor is busiest. Put advice slots on weekday mornings or late afternoons, and keep a few on Saturdays early, before the rush. Slots repeat each week on the weekdays you choose until an end date, so a regular advice morning takes a few minutes to set up. In the planting season, add more; in winter, keep a few for pruning and indoor plants.

If several staff give advice, such as a plant specialist and a pond or fruit tree expert, you can create one service per person or speciality, such as "Fruit tree advice with Marc". Book has one booking page per business and no separate staff calendars, so the service name tells everyone who's expected.

Some topics come round every year: planting bulbs in autumn, pruning roses in late winter, starting a vegetable patch in spring. A themed advice morning, with short slots for several customers on the same subject, lets you prepare once and answer the same questions for several customers. Create it as its own service for those weeks only, with an end date on its slots.

Put your booking link on your website, a sign near the tills and your shop's social pages, and give it to customers who ask a question when the floor is busy. They can book a proper slot instead of waiting.

Say in the home visit description which towns you cover and whether travel is charged further out. Group visits by area on set days, and leave travel time between slots. Bring a plant list and a notebook, and send a written plan with plant names and quantities after the visit.

At the end of the appointment, put the chosen plants aside or note the order, and offer a collection or delivery date. If the order needs a collection slot, book it yourself; first and last name are required, email and phone optional, and the customer receives a confirmation with a calendar file if you enter their email. For planting help, book a follow-up visit the same way.

Customers can't move bookings online: they contact you, and you move the appointment from your bookings list and confirm it yourself, since Book doesn't email clients about changes. Your bookings sync with Google, iPhone or Mac calendars. Book costs €5/month, everything included: unlimited services and bookings, no commission, no contract.