Turning on online booking without losing a morning
A booking page is not a switch. It is four decisions, and a salon that makes them in the wrong order spends the morning undoing the first one.
Most salons turn on online booking the way they would turn on a light, and then spend the rest of the day explaining to clients why the page offered a nine o'clock that nobody works. The page is honest — it offers exactly what the settings say. So the work is in the settings, and it is finite.
One: how long does the service take
Every service needs a duration, and it needs to be the real one. A colour that is booked as an hour and takes two will push the rest of the day into the evening — not on the page, in the chair. Time the three services you sell most and put those numbers in. The rest can be estimates until they prove wrong.
Two: when is the salon open
Opening hours belong to the branch, not to the company, because a second location across town usually opens at a different time. Set them per branch and the page will stop offering hours that only exist somewhere else.
Three: who does what
A master is offered for a service only if the service is attached to them. This is the step most often skipped, and it produces the complaint that the page "shows the wrong people". It is not showing the wrong people; nobody told it which services they perform.
Four: the hour everybody reads
Eleven in the morning means eleven in the salon — in the diary, in the reminder and in the link a client adds to their own calendar. You do not set a timezone per booking and you should not have to think about one.
The page cannot be more correct than the settings behind it. Every complaint about online booking that we have looked at was a setting nobody had filled in.
Then send the reminder
A reminder the day before is the cheapest thing a salon can do about no-shows. It goes out from your own sender name, in the language the client chose, and it costs less than the empty chair. Getting your own gateway approved takes a day or two, so start it before you need it.
The step-by-step version of all of this, with screenshots, is in the guide: Online booking.
Try it on your own salon
Set up a branch, a service and one master, and book yourself in. It takes about ten minutes.