WooCommerce bookings deposit – how to accept down payments on products

In this article, we’ll look at how to accept deposits for your bookings products in WooCommerce. The products could be anything that can be booked: for example, properties like rentals and holiday villas, or items like tools and equipment.

How to accept deposits for bookings in WooCommerce

Let’s pretend you own this nice looking holiday villa.

You’d like to let it out to holidaymakers and make some money back for yourself. In this tutorial, we’ll walk through the process of creating a bookable product for the villa in WooCommerce then learn how to accept deposits on it. You can see how the demo product works here.

This is what our product will look like:

Note that the demo uses the Twenty Twenty theme, but this method will work with any WooCommerce compatible theme.

You can use this menu to navigate the article:

Creating the product in WooCommerce

To accept deposits on bookings, you’ll need two plugins: Bookings for WooCommerce and WooCommerce Deposits and Part Payments.

First of all, let’s look at creating our bookings product in WooCommerce. In our case, the product will be the villa but you can extend this to any type of product.

You’ll need to have the Bookings for WooCommerce plugin installed for this stage.

Creating the product

We’ll create the product in exactly the same way as we would create any other WooCommerce product. Go to Products > Add New and enter the product details.

Setting the booking parameters

Once you’ve entered the product information, change the ‘Product type’ to ‘Booking’.

You’ll see a number of new fields appear. Let’s use these to set the parameters for our booking.

• Booking unit: this is what we’ll use to measure the duration of a booking. Choose from ‘Day’, ‘Night’, or ‘Week’.
• Booking start: you might want to specify a day of the week that your bookings always start from
• Min booking length: the minimum duration that the booking can last. The length is set according to the booking unit above
• Max booking length: the maximum duration that the booking can last. The length is set according to the booking unit above. Leave this field empty if you don’t want a maximum length
• Postpone start: enter a value here if you don’t want customers to make a booking for an immediate start. For example, if you need two days’ notice, enter 2 in this field
• Buffer period: you might want to set a period at the end of each booking, for example to clean and prepare for the next guests
• Standard cost: this is an important one. Enter the standard cost per booking unit

In our example, we’ve used the following settings:

This means that our booking is measured in days. Bookings will be between 7 and 21 days, at a cost of $150 per day.

At this stage, your product will now be available for users to book by choosing their start and end dates. The cost of the booking will be calculated automatically and, once the customer makes the purchase, the product will no longer be available to be booked for the selected dates.

Accepting deposits for bookings in WooCommerce

Now we’ll look at how to accept deposits for the booking. For this section, you’ll need to have the WooCommerce Deposit and Part Payments plugin enabled.

Once the plugin is enabled, we can quickly add the ability to accept deposits on our bookings product. Let’s look at a couple of options.

Accepting fixed amount deposits on bookings in WooCommerce

Firstly, let’s imagine we want to take a fixed deposit for each booking.

• Go to WooCommerce > Settings > Deposits
• Choose ‘All Products’ in the ‘Accept Deposits’ field
• Choose ‘Fixed Amount’ in the ‘Deposit Type’ field
• Enter the value of the deposit – in this case, 200
• Finally, set the ‘Default Payment Method’ to ‘Deposit’ to ensure the customer’s payment will default to the deposit rather than to paying the whole amount in one

Check out the demo product to see this in action.

Accepting deposits as percentages on bookings in WooCommerce

If we want to accept a percentage of the total cost as a deposit, then follow the steps above – but change the following:

• In ‘Deposit Type’, choose ‘Percentage’
• Enter a percentage, e.g. 10, in the ‘Deposit Amount’ field

Check out this article for more information on WooCommerce deposits.

Processing the order

When the customer makes the booking with a deposit, they check out through the normal WooCommerce process.

You can see how the order is divided in the cart and checkout.

Note that the total for the item is only £200. The booking dates and the remaining balance are indicated in the line item. The remaining balance is displayed under the cart totals in the ‘Payable Later’ line.

When the customer makes the payment, the Bookings plugin blocks out the selected dates so that they’re not available to other customers. And the Deposits plugin generates two orders: the first for the value of the deposit, and the second for the remaining balance. This second order has the status of ‘Scheduled’.

The customer can pay the scheduled order at any time from the ‘Orders’ tab of their account page.

WooCommerce bookings deposit – recap

In this article, we looked at how to accept deposits for WooCommerce bookings. We looked at how to create bookable products then how to set up the deposit.

All we needed to accept deposits on bookings were two plugins: Bookings for WooCommerce and WooCommerce Deposits and Part Payments.