Getting the most out of Waypoint Booking

Waypoint Booking turns BigCommerce products into bookable appointments and slots. This guide covers installing the app, setting it up for the way your business actually books time, and the API for connecting your own systems.

Three ideas run through everything below:

• Resources are what gets booked — a staff member, a room, a piece of equipment.
• Services are what's on offer — a named, timed offering (a 30-minute cut, a 1-hour room rental) that you link to a resource.
• A product in your catalog is made bookable by linking it to one resource and one service. That link is what the storefront picker and checkout actually run on.

Install Waypoint Booking from the BigCommerce App Marketplace (or via the install link your partner/developer gave you, if it's not yet publicly listed). Installing grants the app a set of permissions — approve the prompt to continue.

Once approved, BigCommerce opens the app inside your control panel and it walks you straight into the setup wizard — nothing else to configure before that.

1. Welcome A short explainer of what's ahead: a resource, a service, opening hours, and connecting the storefront widget and order sync. Click Get started.
2. Add a resource Give it a Name (e.g. "Room A") and a Timezone (IANA) (e.g. America/New_York) — this is what availability and confirmations are calculated in. Add as many resources as you need before continuing; the step only advances when you click Continue, not automatically.
3. Add a service Give it a Name (e.g. "Haircut") and a Duration (minutes). Again, add every service you need up front — the wizard doesn't force you to stop at one.
4. Set opening hours Pick a Day, Start time, and End time for the resource selected at the top of the step (a resource picker appears once you have more than one). A resource with zero hours set has nothing bookable, so this step matters even if you plan to fine-tune it later.
5. Connect the storefront widget One click — Register widget — injects the booking picker onto your bookable product pages via BigCommerce's Scripts API. No theme editing required.
6. Connect order sync One click — Register order sync — registers the webhooks that confirm a booking automatically when an order is placed, and cancel it automatically if the order is later cancelled or refunded.
7. You're set up Click Finish. The only thing left is linking an actual product to the resource/service you just created — see the next section.

You can dismiss the guide at any point and reopen it later with the Show setup guide link at the top of the Overview tab. Dismissing is per-store, so it won't nag every staff member who logs in separately.

This is the one step the wizard can't do for you, because it depends on your actual catalog. It's a bulk tool, not a one-at-a-time form:

1. Choose a resource and a service from the two selects at the top, and optionally a Channel — leave it on All channels unless you want this link bookable on only one BigCommerce sales channel (see Multi-channel / wholesale).
2. Search and select products in the list below — search matches name or SKU, and Select all respects an active search filter. Each row shows whether it's already linked, and to what.
3. Click "Make Bookable (N)" to apply the resource/service/channel to every selected product at once. Re-running this on an already-linked product updates it in place — it won't create a duplicate.

To unlink, select the already-linked products and click Remove selected. The moment a product is linked, the storefront widget starts appearing on its product page automatically — no republish or cache step needed.

Each resource also has its own subscribable calendar feed URL for staff — see Add-to-calendar & feeds — and, once connected, an optional two-way sync mapping to a Google or Outlook calendar.

A resource can host more than one service (a room used for both yoga and pilates), and a service can be offered by more than one resource (three stylists all offering "Haircut") — resources and services are deliberately independent, so you're not duplicating a service's price and duration per staff member.

Both service-level settings — widget display and recurring series — are merchant decisions made once here, never something a shopper chooses at checkout.

Recurring weekly hours

Pick a Day, Start time, and End time and click Add hours. A resource with no hours set has no bookable slots at all — this is the one thing every resource needs before it can take a booking. Within these hours, slots pack back-to-back continuously by default (a 30-minute service inside 9am–5pm hours offers 9:00, 9:30, 10:00, and so on).

Fixed booking slot times

Optional. Add exact bookable times — say 10:00, 12:00, 14:00 — instead of continuous back-to-back slots. The moment a resource has any fixed time, it switches entirely to fixed-time mode; remove them all to go back to continuous packing. Each entry either recurs on a day of the week, or (toggle One-off (specific date)) is pinned to one exact calendar date — useful for a single special session on a day the resource wouldn't normally be open at all.

One-off exceptions

Overrides the recurring hours for a single date: mark it fully closed (a holiday), or toggle Open (custom hours) and give it different hours than usual. An optional Reason is for your own reference only — shoppers never see it. Exceptions are only shown/editable for the next 180 days.

• Filter by resource, and toggle between week and month view from the top-right of the calendar itself.
• Drag a confirmed booking to a new day or time to reschedule it — only confirmed bookings can be dragged, and dragging can't change how long the booking runs, only when it starts. Dropping onto an already-full slot is rejected and the booking visibly snaps back to where it was.
• Click any booking to open its details: date/time, status, the customer, and — if it's part of a recurring series — a "Series" badge.
• From that details panel: Add to Google Calendar, Add to Outlook, and Download .ics (Apple Calendar or any other app) put that one appointment on your own calendar. Cancel booking cancels it (see the note on refunds below).
• For a resource with capacity greater than 1, the details panel also shows Export attendee list (CSV) — see Events & classes.

Creating a walk-in booking

Use New booking (walk-in / phone) to book directly, bypassing checkout, for a customer you're dealing with in person or over the phone.

1. Find the customer using the search box — it searches your real BigCommerce customer records by name or email. A walk-in booking always needs a real, existing customer record; you can't type in a name and email freehand.
2. Pick a resource, service, date, and time.
3. Click Create booking. It's inserted immediately with no hold step, since a staff member creating this in real time isn't racing a customer's own browser session.

Filtering, rescheduling, cancelling

Filter the list by resource or status. Any confirmed booking can be Rescheduled inline (pick a new resource/service/date/time and save) or Cancelled. A booking that's part of a series shows Cancel entire series instead of a plain cancel, so you're not clicking through ten sessions one at a time.

Orders without a matching booking

Occasionally an order comes through after its hold already expired (the customer took too long at checkout). The order is real and paid, but nothing was automatically reserved for it. Each entry names the order and the reason; follow up with the customer, create the correct booking by hand from Bookings, then click Mark resolved here to clear it.

Webhooks that kept failing

If BigCommerce's order notifications to this app fail repeatedly (six attempts over roughly two hours), the delivery is parked here rather than silently dropped. Once you believe the underlying issue is fixed, click Retry next to the entry.

One appointment at a time: from a booking's details (in the dashboard Calendar tab, or a customer's own My Bookings page on your storefront), Add to Google Calendar and Add to Outlook open a pre-filled event in that provider's own web app; Download .ics covers Apple Calendar and anything else that imports ICS files.

A whole resource's schedule: on the Resources panel, each resource has a Copy feed URL button. Subscribing to that URL (webcal-style) in any calendar app keeps that resource's upcoming bookings showing up automatically, without re-adding anything by hand. It carries no customer names or emails — just when the resource is busy. If a feed URL leaks or a staff member leaves, click Regenerate to invalidate it; anyone still subscribed to the old link stops seeing updates until they re-subscribe with the new one.

Unlike the feed above, this is a genuine two-way connection: a booking confirmed here is pushed into your connected calendar automatically, and an event you create directly in that calendar blocks the matching time from being booked here — useful for blocking out a resource's personal time off without touching this app at all.

Connecting an account

1. On the Advanced tab, click Connect under Google Calendar or Outlook. This opens the provider's sign-in/consent screen in a new browser tab (it can't run inside the embedded control panel).
2. Approve access, then return to the Waypoint Booking tab — it picks up the new connection automatically.
3. Under Resource mapping, pick a provider and a specific calendar for each resource you want synced, then click Save. A resource can sync with Google or Outlook, but not both at once.

A connected account shows as Connected with the account email; if a token expires or access is revoked, it shows Needs attention — click Reconnect to fix it. Disconnect removes the connection and unmaps every resource pointed at it (it does not delete anything already pushed into your calendar).

This is the integration point if you want a customer email, an SMS, a Slack alert, or anything else to fire when a booking is confirmed, cancelled, or coming up. It needs a small amount of setup on your side (or your developer's) to receive and act on the events — see the API guide below for the technical detail.

1. Set a Webhook URL pointing at an endpoint your system controls, and click Save.
2. Copy the signing secret shown below the URL field — your endpoint uses this to verify a delivery genuinely came from Waypoint Booking. Click Regenerate secret any time you need to rotate it.
3. Click "Send test event" to fire a synthetic event at your endpoint immediately, without waiting for a real booking — useful for confirming your receiving code and signature check both work before going live.

The dashboard and storefront widget APIs are session- and hold-token-authenticated for the app's own internal use, and aren't a supported public integration surface — build against the notification webhook and calendar feed instead.

Every event is an HTTP POST to the URL configured in Settings, with header Content-Type: application/json and a signature header described in Verifying signatures. Every payload shares the same envelope:

{
  "event": "booking.confirmed",
  "storeHash": "abc123",
  "createdAt": "2026-07-20T14:32:00.000Z",
  "data": {
    "resource": { "id": 4, "name": "Jane Smith", "timezone": "America/New_York" },
    "service":  { "id": 9, "name": "Haircut", "durationMinutes": 30 },
    "customer": { "name": "Alex Rivera", "email": "alex@example.com" },
    "booking":  {
      "id": 512,
      "status": "confirmed",
      "startUtc": "2026-07-21T23:00:00.000Z",
      "endUtc": "2026-07-21T23:30:00.000Z",
      "seriesId": null
    }
  }
}

Series events (booking.series_confirmed / booking.series_cancelled) carry a bookings array instead of a single booking object — one entry per session in the course, sharing one seriesId.

Every request carries an x-waypoint-signature header: an HMAC-SHA256 hex digest of the raw request body, keyed by the signing secret shown in Settings. Verify it against the raw body bytes, before any JSON parsing, or the signature won't match.

// Node.js / Express example
import { createHmac, timingSafeEqual } from 'crypto';

app.post('/webhooks/waypoint-booking', express.raw({ type: 'application/json' }), (req, res) => {
  const signature = req.header('x-waypoint-signature') ?? '';
  const expected = createHmac('sha256', process.env.WAYPOINT_WEBHOOK_SECRET)
    .update(req.body) // raw Buffer, not the parsed object
    .digest('hex');

  const ok = signature.length === expected.length &&
    timingSafeEqual(Buffer.from(signature, 'hex'), Buffer.from(expected, 'hex'));

  if (!ok) return res.status(401).send('bad signature');

  const event = JSON.parse(req.body);
  // ... react to event.event / event.data
  res.sendStatus(200);
});

Treat a delivery with a bad or missing signature as untrusted and discard it — it didn't come from Waypoint Booking.

These all produce standard RFC 5545 .ics files, importable by any calendar application.

The widget isn't showing up on a product page

Confirm the product is actually linked in Make products bookable, and that the widget is registered (Overview → setup guide, or Catalog). The widget looks for your theme's standard add-to-cart form; on a heavily customized theme it may need a small adjustment — contact support with the product URL if it's genuinely missing.

A customer's order came through but there's no booking

Check Needs attention on the Overview tab — this is exactly what "Orders without a matching booking" surfaces (usually a checkout that took longer than the hold duration). Create the booking manually and mark it resolved.

How long does confirmation take after checkout?

Up to about a minute — orders are confirmed by a background process, not instantly inside the checkout request itself, so a booking may briefly show as pending before flipping to confirmed.

Why does availability look off by an hour?

Check the resource's Timezone (IANA) field first — every hour, exception, and slot is calculated in that resource's own timezone, not your browser's or the shopper's.

Can different staff have different permissions in the app?

Not yet — any BigCommerce staff login that can open the app has full access to every panel, including Settings.

Does cancelling in the dashboard refund the customer?

No — see the note under The calendar. Refunds happen in BigCommerce's own order admin.

• No remaining-capacity count shown to shoppers — a group session reads as available or full, not "27 of 30 left."
• No built-in merchant-facing alert channel beyond the notification webhook — you (or your developer) decide how a new booking actually reaches you day to day.
• No per-staff permission levels inside the dashboard.
• Walk-in/manual bookings don't support recurring series — series booking is storefront-checkout only.
• Two-way calendar sync is Beta — see the note under Two-way sync.
• Availability is configured per resource; there's no store-wide default schedule to set once and inherit.