Although the Booqable team is still working at home, our product team went full-steam ahead the past two months. We continue to focus on improving and adding new features to Booqable, and are looking forward to sharing several exciting updates with you in the weeks ahead!
Today, we introduce several online store improvements, including embeddable components for categories, filters and sorting, and a new single-page shopping cart. With these components, you can offer customers a more robust e-commerce experience and improve the usability of your rental store.
Let’s look at what these improvements have in store for you.
Product categories
Booqable now allows you to group your products into categories, making it easier for customers to find them in your online store. With the new embeddable sidebar, the way products are displayed in your rental store also becomes more organized.
Here are a few examples of categories that you can create:
- Products of a certain type, such as cameras, lenses, or accessories
- Products for men, women, or children
- Products of specific brands
- Product bundles
- New products
Once you have assigned products to a category in Booqable, you can add a new sidebar to your website that presents the categories and subcategories you have created. The sidebar also includes a date picker, giving your customers an even smoother booking experience.
It’s easy to create categories and subcategories from the Settings in your Booqable admin. You can hide them in your store if needed (temporarily during setup, for example). After you’ve created some categories, you can easily add or remove products from them from both your online reservation settings and individual product pages.
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Filtering and sorting options
We are also introducing filtering and sorting options for the online store. This update allows you to set how products should be sorted and filtered by default, and allows your customers to select from a few sorting options:
- Standard sorting: product names or custom sorting
- Product price: ascending and descending
- Newest products: newest first
We created embeddable components that include your filters and sorting options and a search bar (optional), which means you can now embed the following elements:
- Embeddable shopping cart
- Shopping cart button
- Date picker
- Sidebar (date picker and categories)
- Search field
- Product sorting
- Category list
Note: The Booqable-hosted store will have the new category sidebar with date picker, plus the filters and sorting options by default. On your own website, you can embed each component to your liking.
Embeddable shopping cart
Due to popular demand, the new shopping cart is the standard in your Booqable-hosted store. On your website, you can choose between the current floating shopping cart or the new embeddable cart and button (as you will find in most e-commerce stores). When you embed the new shopping cart button on your website, it replaces the floating cart automatically.
When customers add a lot of products to their cart, the embeddable cart is more organized and gives a better overview. It also provides a recognizable checkout experience as customers are used to the single-page cart configuration in most e-commerce stores.
That’s it for this week. Let us know if you have any questions or feedback, and stay tuned for more features and improvements in the next few weeks!
