Adding online booking to a salon website
Online booking on your salon website
In short
Adding online booking to a salon website means putting the salon’s live availability on its own domain, so a client books without leaving the site. The three usual routes are a booking page hosted on the salon’s domain, an embedded widget inside an existing site, or a link out to a marketplace profile. The first two keep the client and the traffic; the third does not.
Before you buy
What to look for
A link out is a leak
Sending a client from your website to a marketplace profile hands over the end of your own funnel. The client arrives somewhere that also lists your competitors, and the booking, the contact details and the follow-up belong to the platform rather than to you.
Prices have to come from one place
A website with prices typed into it will disagree with the booking system within a month, because one of them gets updated and the other does not. Services, durations and prices should be published from the same records the salon books and charges against.
The booking page is a page Google indexes
If booking happens on your own domain, the page can rank, carry your structured data, and be linked to. If it happens on somebody else’s, the marketplace gets all of that. Check whether the booking page sits on your domain or theirs before anything else.
Check it on a phone, at night
Most salon bookings are made on a phone outside opening hours. The test that matters is a client on a phone, one-handed, choosing a service, a person and a time, and paying a deposit, without pinching to zoom.
In BeautifyOS
What we built
- Website
- A real website for the salon, built from thirteen designed templates and edited in place, carrying its own booking page rather than linking out to somebody else’s marketplace.
- Online booking
- Clients book from the salon’s own website, its booking page or its app, against the same live calendar the salon works from, with deposits and cancellation rules applied at the moment of booking.
- Client app
- The salon’s own app for its clients: booking, their appointments, their gift cards and a chat with the salon, under the salon’s name and colors.
- Deposits and cancellation rules
- Per-service deposit rules taken at the time of booking, with cancellation windows, so the expensive appointments are the protected ones.
Questions
Answered
- How do I add online booking to my salon website?
- Either publish the booking page on your own domain, or embed the booking widget in the site you already have. BeautifyOS does both, and includes a website if you do not have one.
- Do I need a separate website builder?
- No. BeautifyOS includes a website built from thirteen designed templates and edited in place, with the booking page inside it.
- Will my prices stay in step with the booking system?
- Yes. The site publishes services, durations and prices from the same records the salon books and charges against, so a price changed once is right everywhere.
Keep reading
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Give your salon its own operating system
Set up in an afternoon: your services, your team, your booking page.