Q&A › Online booking
How bookings reach your calendar, what stops no-shows, and what it does to the phone.
If people book time with you, the booking system is the website. Everything else on the page exists to get someone to that button.
The site shows real availability from a calendar, the customer picks a slot, and it is written back as an appointment. The important part is that availability is live — a form that emails you a request is not booking, it is a different kind of phone tag.
It reduces the calls that are purely "do you have Thursday at two". It does not stop the calls where someone wants advice or reassurance, and you would not want it to — those are the ones that become bigger jobs.
Reminders by text the day before, and a deposit for anything long or expensive. Reminders alone make a measurable difference. A deposit all but eliminates it, at the cost of some people not booking at all, which is a trade every business judges differently.
They can book at three in the morning for an appointment during your hours — that is most of the value. A good share of bookings happen when a business is closed and the phone would not have been answered.
Both are normal and most booking systems support taking a card at the time of booking. Decide whether a deposit is deducted from the final price or is a separate holding fee, and say which plainly on the page. Ambiguity here causes disputes.
Automatic is a better customer experience and fills gaps you would not have filled. Manual approval is safer when your availability is genuinely unpredictable. Automatic plus accurate hours beats manual plus guesswork, so the honest hours matter more than the setting.
Most systems can, and it is worth setting up properly — otherwise someone books a service with a person who does not perform it. It means defining each person's hours and services rather than one shared calendar, which takes an afternoon and saves months of confusion.
A system reading from one live calendar prevents it. Double bookings almost always come from running two systems in parallel — a paper book and an online one — which is why a partial migration is worse than either option alone.
Yes, prominently. Plenty of people will never use a booking form, and an older or less confident customer who cannot find a phone number simply goes elsewhere. Offer both and let people choose.
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