Setup & Onboarding

New to BookThatApp? Your Dashboard includes an interactive onboarding checklist to guide you through the key steps needed to integrate BTA with your Shopify store. The checklist walks you through everything required to get BookThatApp set up and ready to accept bookings — work through each step in order for the smoothest experience.

To get started, open BookThatApp from your Shopify admin. The Dashboard is the first screen you'll see when the app loads.

The four setup steps

1. 🧩 Enable the theme extension Enable the BookThatApp theme embed in your Shopify theme and save.

This is the most important first step. Without the theme embed active, the BookThatApp booking widget cannot load on your storefront — customers won't be able to see or use it.

You can check your embed status at the top of your Dashboard. If it shows as Inactive, a button will appear that takes you directly to the right place in Shopify to enable it. Once enabled, save your theme changes and return to the Dashboard — your status will update automatically.

→ Active — embed is enabled and working
 → Inactive — embed needs to be turned on
 → Legacy version — an older embed is in use; consider updating

You can refer to the guide here as well: Enabling the BTA Booking Widgets App Embed

2. 📦 Add your first booking service Create your first service and configure its availability and settings.

A service is the bookable offering you want customers to reserve. This could be an appointment, a rental, a class, an event, or any other time-based offering you run through your store.

When setting up your service you'll configure key details like duration, availability windows, capacity, and any other settings specific to how that service works. You can always come back and adjust these after your initial setup.

3. 🗓️ Create your first booking widget Create a widget and connect it to your service so customers can book on your storefront.

A widget is the booking interface that appears on your Shopify store — it's what customers interact with to select a date, time, and complete their booking.

During this step you'll connect the widget to the service you created in step 2. This tells the widget which availability and settings to use when displaying booking options to customers.

4. 🎨 Style your widget Customize the widget's appearance to match your store's design and branding.

Once your widget is working, you can customize how it looks so it feels native to your store. Adjust colors, fonts, button styles, and other visual elements to match your brand.

This step is optional for getting bookings live, but recommended for a polished customer experience.

🔄 Progress tracking Your Dashboard tracks your progress automatically. As you complete each step, it's marked with a check icon so you always know where you are and what's left to do. You don't need to manually update anything.

💡 Tip: The onboarding checklist is visible to new users and disappears once all steps are complete. After that, your Dashboard switches to showing daily monitoring and booking insights to help you track performance ongoing.