Online booking from your own website

Torqix gives every shop a public booking page at /book/your-address — the same address your work request form uses, with /book/ in front instead of /r/. Put the link on your own website, your Google profile, or anywhere else a customer finds you. They pick a day, pick an open time, leave a name and a phone number, and the request lands with you. It is a plain page that works on any phone and needs nothing installed — no app, and it works even with JavaScript switched off.

Turning it on

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   Step 1: Publish your work request form

   Under Settings › Work request form, pick your address and tick Publish it. The booking page only answers while the form is published — unpublishing the form closes both pages at once.

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   Step 2: Tick Online booking

   On the same screen, tick Online booking. It is its own switch, off by default, because it opens its own door: a stranger on the internet putting a request in your queue.

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   Step 3: Check the page, then link it

   Use Open your booking page to see exactly what a customer sees, then put the address behind the button on your own website. It is an ordinary link — no code snippet to paste and nothing to embed.

The times are your real times

The page offers the next two weeks, and the open times it shows come from the same place your calendar does: your opening hours, your bays, and the appointments already on the books. If Tuesday afternoon is full, Tuesday afternoon is not offered. Times are shown in your shop's local time whatever device the customer is holding, and the page speaks English and Spanish — the customer can switch at the top.

The check runs again the moment they press Ask for this time. If somebody else took the window while they were typing, they are told plainly and asked to pick another — they are never left believing a stale page.

It asks; you confirm

What a customer sends is a request, not a booking, and the page says so to them in as many words before they submit. It lands in Schedule › Appointment requests — the same queue the phone agent's requests wait in — marked Draft with an Online booking badge so you can see which door it came through. Use Review & confirm to put it on the calendar, or decline it with a reason. Until a person here confirms, nothing exists on the schedule.

A request carries a name, a number, the window they asked for, and whatever they told you about the car — year, make, model and plate, all optional and all exactly as they typed them. If you have switched the vehicle lookup on for your work request form, the booking page gets the same one box as every other screen that takes a car: the customer types a plate, a VIN or "2018 Toyota Prius", presses search once, and the four fields fill in. Everything on Finding a car applies here. What booking does not keep is a VIN or an issuing state — the request has no column for either — so a VIN somebody searches with becomes the car it names and is not stored, and the state chooser under the box only aims the lookup. With the lookup switched off there is no search box at all, only the four fields; make and model suggest as somebody types if you have loaded the vehicle catalogue, and are plain text boxes otherwise. It creates no customer record and no vehicle by itself; if the number matches exactly one customer you already know, the request says so, and otherwise you decide at confirm time. When you confirm without picking a vehicle yourself, Torqix looks for the plate on that customer's cars first and uses the one it finds, so a returning customer does not end up with the same car twice.

A booked-online slot is kept for a few minutes

When somebody picks a time on your booking page, Torqix keeps one bay for them for ten minutes while the request waits for you. Nobody else — not the next visitor to the page, and not the phone agent — is offered that bay in the meantime, so two customers cannot pick the same one in the same minute. The request card tells you which bay is being kept and for how long. Confirming the same window takes that bay up; declining hands it back immediately; and if nobody gets to it, the bay frees itself when the few minutes are up. A kept bay is never an appointment: it appears in no report, no export and no number you read.

A phone number is not texting permission

The page tells the customer, next to the phone field, that leaving their number is not permission to text them — the shop will call, or ask first. Torqix stores no consent flag from this page, because none was given. When you call to confirm the time, that conversation is where you ask properly if you want to text them later.

That is also what decides whether pressing Review & confirm sends anything. A confirmed request is an appointment like any other, so if Confirm an appointment when it is booked is ticked under Shop settings › Appointment confirmations and reminders it gets your ordinary booking confirmation. For a stranger that comes to nothing: this page records no permission and asks for no email address, so there is no way to reach them, and the appointment card says so. For somebody you already have — a request is linked to an existing customer when exactly one of yours carries that number — the confirmation goes to a number that already gave you permission, the moment you confirm. If you would rather every one of those be a phone call and nothing else, leave that setting off.

What keeps the queue clean

The page quietly refuses submissions that look like a script rather than a person, and it shares one rate limit with your work request form, so a spammer cannot use one page to get around the other's ceiling. A refused bot is shown the ordinary thank-you page and told nothing about why — every attempt, kept or refused, is recorded in your audit trail.

Pressing Review & confirm is what sends. The moment you confirm the request into a real appointment, Torqix texts the customer a confirmation — email instead when there is no consented number, and nothing at all when there is neither — and a reminder follows the day before at the hour the shop set. Nobody presses send for either of them. This is the same pair of messages every appointment gets, however it was booked, and it is switchable: the confirmation and the reminder each have their own setting in Shop settings under Customer follow-up. Look at what those are set to before you promise a customer they will not hear from you.