Pulling a shop's bookings into one place

A much-loved community self-care shop near us runs workshops, candle-making one week, pottery the next, and they sell those spaces across a few different platforms. ClassBento for some, Eventbrite for others. Each platform has its own dashboard and its own way of showing what’s booked and what’s still free.

The trouble is that none of those dashboards talk to each other. To see the whole week in one go, where they were at capacity and where there were still spaces left to fill, the owner was copying every event into a spreadsheet by hand. An hour here, an hour there, every week, just to get a single list of what was actually happening.

There wasn’t an off-the-shelf tool that did this. The big booking platforms have no reason to help you see your bookings anywhere other than their own site, and a general automation tool would have taken almost as long to wire up as the copying did. This is exactly the kind of small, specific job that falls through the gap between the products everyone already sells.

So we sat down with the owner and worked out what they actually needed to see from each event: the date, the platform, how many spaces were left, and not much else. Then we built a small Chrome extension. One button. The owner clicks it, and it reads the bookings from both platforms at once, folds them into one tidy list, and drops them into a simple portal laid out the way they think about their week.

Underneath it isn’t complicated, and it isn’t meant to be. It grabs both sources at the same time so a slow page can’t hold up the other, merges them, and sends the result to the portal. Good enough to do the job, with nothing in it the shop will ever have to think about.

What used to be an hour of copying is now a click. It is a small thing. But a small thing that hands a busy owner an hour back every week, and a clear view of their own business, is exactly the sort of thing we like to make.