Should customers be able to book online from your website?
Yes, if your work comes in as appointments or tables and people try to book outside your opening hours. Online booking on a small business website lets a customer choose a free slot at eleven at night without waiting for your reply, and the booking lands in the calendar you already use. Salons and busy restaurants gain the most. A firm that quotes for each job gains little.
Take a two-chair salon that books by phone and through Instagram messages. During the day the phone rings while both stylists have their hands in someone's hair, so it goes to voicemail. In the evening the owner sits on the sofa answering the messages that piled up, from people asking whether there is anything Thursday after five or how long a balayage takes. Replies go out the next morning. By then some of those people have booked with a salon whose website let them pick a time.
Online booking moves that work to the customer's side. The page lists each service with its length and its price, with the free times beside them. It takes the booking whenever the customer gets round to it. What you give up is the chat. A regular who likes to ring will keep ringing, and you lose nothing by that; the booking page is for the people who would rather not call.
Our first question is which booking tool holds your diary today. Plenty of salons and gyms already run one, with years of client history and their regulars in it, and moving all that to please a web designer would be a poor trade. We connect the website to the tool you have, so the times on the page are the real free times. If you have none yet, we help you choose one that fits how you work. Its maker bills you for it directly each month, and the price depends on the tool and on how many of your staff use it.
Restaurants work a little differently. Casa Nogueira, a restaurant in Braga, has a Reservar Mesa button on the site we built that stays with the reader as they scroll the carta, with the opening hours beside it. Visitors read the menu on a phone and ask for a table from the same screen, and the case study records four times as many table requests in the tourist months.
That button sends a request, and for most small places a request is enough. The customer gives a date, a time and the number of people, and the message reaches you in seconds; you confirm it when you next look at your phone. A full booking system that holds tables and runs a waitlist pays its way in a room that turns tables all evening. Below that, it is a monthly bill for a problem you do not have.
Some businesses should keep the phone as the way in. A roofer cannot sell a slot before seeing the roof, so a quote form with a few good questions does more than a calendar ever could. A therapist whose first session depends on a conversation is better off letting people book a short call than opening the whole diary. And a business that keeps its diary on paper, with no wish to change, will find an online booking page out of step with the book on the counter within a week. For those owners a clear phone number and the hours you answer it are worth more.
No-shows are the other reason owners ask us about booking. For a treatment that blocks an hour of your day, we recommend taking a deposit when the customer books, with the cancellation terms written beside the button. Stated in a sentence on the page, the rule saves an awkward conversation later.
On a site we build, the booking flow is set up and tested end to end on real phones before launch. A Starter website starts from £800 and a Business website from £1,300, with the booking tool billed separately by its maker.
Starting prices, UK, before VAT
Starter website
from£800
Up to 5 pages. The essentials, built to bring in enquiries.
Business website
from£1,300
5–10 pages, with an editor so you can change the words and photos yourself. Our most common build.
Our rule of thumb is that if you answer the same message about free slots several times a week, the website should be answering it for you. Tell us how bookings reach you now and which tool, if any, holds your diary, and we will say whether online booking would earn its place or whether a clearer contact page will do for now.
Written by Maksym Gavrylenko · Published