Understand booking availability rules

The finder represents WooCommerce Bookings availability; it does not define prices, durations, resources, capacity, or availability rules of its own.

Product eligibility

A product must:

• be a WooCommerce booking product;
• be published;
• have available slots for the selected day;
• remain publicly reachable.

Availability updates consider the booking product and its resource IDs. A day with no free slots is removed for that product.

Indexed horizon

Saving a bookable product queues availability rebuilding from the current day through the next year. Booking creation and cancellation refresh the affected date without rebuilding the whole product.

Because updates run through Action Scheduler, a save or booking event may not appear in the finder until its queued action finishes.

Visitor journey

The shortcode renders one date input. For an available product it displays:

• the product image or WooCommerce placeholder;
• product title;
• each indexed time as a radio choice;
• the product’s normal add-to-cart button text.

Following the button adds the chosen date and slot to the product URL. On the booking product page, the module waits for the WooCommerce date picker and slots, selects the requested day, and selects the matching time. If the exact time is unavailable by then, the current interface falls back to the first available slot.

The product form remains authoritative. The customer must review the selected date, time, price, and availability before adding the booking to the cart.

Cache boundary

Do not statically cache the finder response as a permanent availability promise. Results can change when another customer books, a resource changes, or background indexing has not completed.