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, a phone number and — if you ask for them — an email address and what the car needs, 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. Days you are closed, and days with nothing left, are crossed out on the strip rather than offered as links, and the page opens on the first day that has a time — so a customer looking at six in the evening is not greeted by an empty today. 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. You can confirm it at the time they picked or at any other you agree with them — before opening, on a closed day, or over a full hour with Book anyway — because the page's rules are for what customers pick, not for you.

A request carries a name, a number, the window they asked for, what they said the car needs, their email address if they gave one, and whatever they told you about the car — year, make, model and plate, all optional and all exactly as they typed them. What the car needs and the email box follow the What they need and Email address rows on the work request form screen — Required, Optional or Hidden — so one setting governs both pages. What they wrote about the car becomes the appointment's title when you confirm, and you can rewrite it first. 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.

The page always asks permission to text, and the box is optional

The booking page always asks for permission to text, in a box beside the number — it is not a setting. Its fixed wording says your shop may send them SMS text messages about this request and their vehicle, how often, that rates may apply, the words HELP and STOP, and that consent is not a condition of any purchase. Here the box is optional: a booking sends unticked. (On your work request form the same ask is required.) The request keeps their answer, the exact words and the moment, and the card tells you which way they answered. Only a ticked box does anything: when you confirm, it is recorded on that customer's number as their own consent, so the confirmation can go as a text. An unticked box is kept as their answer and grants nothing.

That is also what decides whether confirming a request sends anything. A confirmed request is an appointment like any other: Save confirms it and tells the customer nothing, and Save and send gives it your ordinary booking confirmation, if Confirm an appointment when it is booked is ticked under Shop settings › Appointment confirmations and reminders. For a stranger, it goes as a text if they ticked the box, by email if they left an address — the address goes on the new customer when you confirm — and nowhere if they did neither, in which case the request card tells you to call and the appointment card says nothing was sent. 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 with Save and send. If you would rather every one of those be a phone call and nothing else, press Save, or 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.

Confirming is what can send. The moment you confirm the request into a real appointment with Save and send, 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. Save leaves the confirmation for later: the appointment card keeps a Send confirmation button. Nobody presses send for the reminder. 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.