You Can Book Me is one of the original booking services. Starting in 2011, also known as YCBM is a really neat, clean and simple online scheduling system. YouCanBook.me does a number of things really well;
- They force you to sync an external calendar - this is part of the way they monetize their service, as they charge only for synced calendars.
- They have a really neat way of representing communication templates with a bit of a flow diagram which shows what messages get sent where before and after appointments.
- They have a single and iconic booking page style which is easy to use and fill in.
- Nice automatic time zone detection.
- Quite easy to just invite staff and for them to work out how to use the system.
The draw backs of YouCanBook.me are that it lacks flexibility which it has traded off for an easier user experience. These trade-offs include.
- Compulsory calendar syncing - which makes it hard and confusing to remove synced calendars or adjust uni or bi directional syncing.
- It is hard to understand if synced calendars are at a business or staff level or both.
- It is hard to understand if you can add multiple calendars to a single staff.
- The YCBM booking page is limited in customization, but it is quite fast and responsive to load.
- It is difficult to draw a distinction between staff availability and that of the service as it does seem to be confounded.
- It is also quite difficult to analyze data from YCBM especially in Google Analytics
Overall You Can Book Me is a good product for businesses who have scheduling requirements that are slightly more complex than Calendly. However, business owners might find that they quickly outgrow the functionality of YCBM as their team grows and as they need more sophisticated scheduling tools.