You do not need WooCommerce to use CabGrid on your site… Checkout, payment, notifications and booking management features are all built-in!

Several CabGrid users have asked about WooCommerce integration. WooCommerce is an e-commerce (shop) platform/plugin for WordPress. As of CabGrid Pro v5.6.3, WooCommerce integration is not required or available. This article is concerned with whether WooCommerce integration is either necessary or a good idea. We invite you to post your thoughts in the comments section below… (specifically, any use-case example where WooCommerce would be required)

WooCommerce’s primary functionality provides a means for listing fixed price tangible products. It does offer some variance and a great deal of customisation. It also offers many features that benefit the traditional shop model – such as stock control and payment processing. Many of these features are not relevant to a taxi (or travel) booking service.

For the most part, CabGrid is expecting to calculate prices for single journeys and offer booking thereof. There is no need for a ‘shopping cart’ to store multiple items – in fact, such a feature would only complicate the CabGrid service – enabling booking of multiple journeys in one transaction… The data collected for each would be overwhelming and confusing for the customer. So, with that in mind, CabGrid Pro’s booking and payment functionality sticks to a single journey per transaction.

Another feature of WooCommerce that could be an advantage over CabGrid’s standard feature set is payment processor integration and options. At present CabGrid Pro can take payments via Paypal alone whereas WooCommerce offers integration with other services, such as Stripe. If no payment gateway (Paypal) is entered in CabGrid, booking requests are emailed to the admin contact. It is down to them to request payment and process as desired… e.g. cash at end of journey.

CabGrid can also manage post-booking payments, either by generating a Paypal link which can subsequently be sent to the customer, or by sending a payment request from the Booking Management system. Because bookings are not necessarily acceptable at the time of booking, this provides flexibility.

That said, CabGrid could also provide integration with additional online payment processing providers (e.g. Braintree, Authorize.net, Paymentez, WS Pay, DPO Paygate) in future (if there’s demand for it).

WooCommerce will also provide customisable checkout forms. However, CabGrid already provides customisable booking forms with all information being sent to the administrator via email.

WooCommerce will offer generic order management that may be capable of handling bookings, but CabGrid offers the Booking Management Add-on which is specifically tailored to managing taxi bookings.

Overall, in CabGrid it is our aim to provide a simple and effective stand-alone journey fare calculator and booking service without the need for other third-party plugins, and thus integrating WooCommerce is not something we would consider a benefit to the system. However, we would welcome your thoughts and comments on this below – especially with use-case examples?…