La Marie Beauty — Bookly-Square Integration

Technical documentation of the Bookly-Square integration for the La Marie Beauty project, focusing on the $0 service / card-capture workflow and related bugs surfaced during the 2025-12-12 sync call.

Overview

The core requirement for this project is allowing clients to book a $0 service (no charge at time of booking) while capturing a credit card on file for pre-appointment authorization. The integration stack is:

• WordPress / WooCommerce — storefront and product catalog
• Bookly — appointment scheduling plugin
• Square — payment processor and POS
• Zapier — previously used for WooCommerce↔Square sync (status: suspected lingering)

Current Status

Core Bug: $0 Service Card Capture Failure

Symptom

A test booking completes successfully end-to-end through the Bookly flow, but the captured card information does not appear in the Square dashboard. No card data is stored for pre-appointment authorization.

Investigation Findings

• Eshock's conclusion: The issue lies with Square's API behavior, not the custom integration code. His implementation of the checkout/card-capture flow is believed to be correct.
• Environment note: There is no staging Square environment. All testing runs against the live production Square account, which complicates safe iteration.
• Bookly viability question: It is not yet confirmed whether Bookly's plugin natively supports the $0 service + card-capture pattern. This is the primary open research question.

Path Forward

Kimberly Gehrmann is conducting a deep-dive into Bookly's documentation to determine:
1. Whether Bookly supports the $0 service / card-capture workflow out of the box
2. Whether a replacement scheduling plugin should be considered

Note: This is not a quick documentation scan — the investigation is expected to require significant focused research time before a conclusion can be reached.

Secondary Bug: Product Location Switching (Zapier)

Symptom

Approximately 12 products in Square had their location switched unexpectedly. This has happened at least twice — once early in the project (shortly after initial Zapier setup) and again recently.

Diagnosis

Square support identified Zapier as the only possible cause of location field mutations via the API.

Hypothesis

A Zapier integration set up by a former team member (Chris) may still be active despite the team's belief it was fully disabled during offboarding. WooCommerce is expected to communicate directly with Square without Zapier, but this has not been fully verified.

Action Items

• Melissa Cusumano — Audit all Zapier accounts associated with the project to confirm no active zaps remain
• Roxana Lopez — Forward the original Square support email detailing the affected products to give the team a full list for investigation

Resolved: "New Line" Character Bug

Cause: The WooCommerce Matomo Analytics plugin was injecting a newline/slash character into output.
Resolution: Eshock (Isahaque Mahmud) deactivated the plugin.
Risk: If Matomo Analytics tracking is needed for WooCommerce in the future, an alternative implementation will be required.

Resolved: /services Page and URL Routing

• The /services page is now correctly rendering service tiles.
• Eshock changed the Bookly page URL route from /services to /appointments to avoid conflicts.
• Bookly-powered pages are currently only attached to unpublished mock pages (e.g., the "vampire facial" test service); live service pages still route to Square directly via "Book Now" buttons.

Open Questions

1. Does Bookly natively support $0 service bookings with card capture, or does this require custom API work against Square?
2. Is there a Square API limitation that prevents card tokenization for $0 transactions, independent of Bookly?
3. Should Bookly be replaced with a different scheduling plugin that has better-documented Square payment integration?
4. Are there any active Zapier zaps still running under Chris's account or the project's Zapier workspace?

Related

• ^[1]
• ^[2]
• ^[3]