I am trying to see if something like this would be possible.
My client would like to offer time slot booking for their studio space. A user would have to go to their website, create a memberships account and purchase session credits. The credits will be sold in batches - i.e. 1, 4 and 8.
Then they would be able to use said credits to book a time slot in a dynamic calendar that would offer spaces based on availability and gear. I have already worked out (I think) a way to integrate this with calendly.
But my questions are these:
How do I assign (add) a number of sessions to a user profile automatically, based on the package they’ve chosen (+1,+4 or +8)?
How do I make sure to automatically deduct (-1) from that number every time they book a session? Especially since it will be done with calendly as part of the steps?
How do I prompt users to buy more session credits when their amount reaches 0?
I hope that there’s a native solution via logic for this flow.
Webflow is excellent for UI design but it doesn’t offer much in the way of application features. If this is a Webflow-hosted site, your best bet is to use Wized + Xano to manage the business logic and datastore.
I’d strongly advise that direction rather that trying to build it on an automation infrastructure ( Zapier, Make, n8n… ), because that creates a fragility problem for accounting systems like this. All it takes is for one automation to go offline and you’ll have a real challenge in trying to reassemble that history and fix those invalid credit balances.
To avoid that risk, avoid trying to track credit balance as a number in the CMS, and avoid incrementing / decrementing it as transactions occur.
Keep a ledger instead. Each transaction- whether credit or debit, should be logged with a date and +/- amount. You’ll likely need to be able to show that to the customer anyway, but most importantly, you now have a source of truth, and you simply sum the credits on those transactions to find the current balance.
As transactions occur, you can update the CMS so that the current balance is easy to access in your page designs- but that’s unnecessary if you’re using Wized because you’ll have a decent set of app dev tools there anyway.
Frankly this is a change that was introduced by the client at a very late stage and I thought it would be far easier to resolve. I understand your precautions about using an automation workflow and I would really love to offer my client a solution that would work optimally 24/7. However, I do believe that your proposed solution far exceeds my current capabilities. I have just gained access to wized and have just found out about xano through this discussion. Can you please provide me with some reading resources that would get me started quickly in my use case?
Also, are you suggesting that I build the calendar within wized instead of using the calendly service?
Ah, that’s a bit like ordering a car and then requesting you add wings. A website and an application are very different things, so you’ll need to set things straight with your client.
Pretty much the entire accounting system-
Purchase of credits
Debit of credits on booking
Tracking & display of credits, by user
The user login system itself
Involves system parts you do not yet have, and Webflow doesn’t provide a complete solution for. You could sell the credits through ECommerce, but you’d have to automate the addition of credits to the users. You could login using Memberships, but Memberships does not have the facility to easily access and utilize custom User Data like a credits field, or to store a history of bookings, etc.
All of that really needs application tooling.
I haven’t actually had the opportunity to put Wized through the paces in a serious way, as most of our custom applications are built on AWS, or Blazor. But from what I’ve researched so far, it supports authentication, account tracking, SSO, business logic, data storage integration. Pretty much everything you need.
I cannot answer your question about Calendly in this particular situation, but if the solution you’ve found allows you to identify the user and track the debit, you should be fine.
Wized has active forums that should be able to help you, you’re definitely far outside of Webflow design space on this aspect of your system.
