# 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.

_Last verified: 2026-09-05. Source: https://bookodile.com/docs/setting-up-your-booking-page_

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

1. **A service** — something to book, with a duration and a price.
2. **Someone who can perform it** — at least one active, bookable person
   assigned to that service.
3. **Working hours** — for the business, and for that person.
4. **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

1. Set your **business working hours** first — everything narrows from there.
2. Add your **services** with realistic durations and buffers.
3. Add **people**, set their own hours, and assign them to services.
4. Set **booking settings** — minimum notice is the one people get wrong.
5. Open your own booking page in a private window and book something. It is the
   only way to see what customers see.

## Trying a booking yourself

The last screen of sign-up offers to walk you through one booking on your own
booking page, exactly as a customer makes it. A sample customer is filled in
and the first free time is picked for you, so it takes a few taps. Then the
calendar opens on that day and points at the booking, marked **Sample**.

Those are the first two of three steps called **Getting started**; the third is
finishing your setup with Bookodile in AI Chat. Until all three are done, a
card at the top of the sidebar shows the next one, on every page. Skip a step
and it waits there; hide the card with its × and it does not come back by
itself.

It is a sample, and it behaves like one:

- **Nobody is sent anything** — no confirmation, reminder or follow-up, no text
  message, and no Google Calendar event. The sample customer's address is one
  we never send to, and there is no phone number to text.
- **It never counts toward the free plan's 40 bookings a month**, nor in the
  dashboard's figures, Reports or the forecast.
- **It removes itself.** Once its time has passed it goes, together with the
  sample customer, within about ten minutes.
- **One at a time per location.** Confirming again while the first is still
  ahead keeps the first rather than booking twice.

## 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 profile](/docs/reference-business-profile#description) — it is used
  as the search snippet, so it is worth writing) and your address — and, once
  you have added your
  [Google Maps link](/docs/reference-business-profile#google-maps-link), which
  business on Google Maps it is (the page itself shows no map);
- 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.

## Sharing your booking page

Send your booking page in a chat, or post it somewhere, and it opens into a clean
picture with your business's name on it rather than a general one: your name on
white, with a small Bookodile logo under it. There is nothing to set up, and your
website shares the same picture.

Within about ten minutes of changing your name, address, colour, logo or website
photos, the picture follows by itself.

## 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.
- **A chat keeps the picture it first showed.** A page already sent keeps its old
  picture there, whatever you change. Sharing it again in a new chat may show the
  new one, and that is up to the chat app.
- **The picture shows your name and nothing else of yours.** Your logo, colour,
  address and photos don't go on it, and you can't swap it for a picture of your own.
- **A new business shares a general Bookodile picture** until its name has been
  checked, and so does any name held for a person to look at. For the first few
  minutes after that, it may share no picture at all. Its website shares no picture
  until then.
- **Only the booking page itself has your picture.** Its other pages, like your
  reviews, share the general one.