Do you need an online booking system?

If customers can only book by phone or through a contact form, every booking is a conversation. At five a week that is fine, even friendly. At fifty it is a part-time job, done in the evenings.

This guide is for service businesses deciding whether it is time for online booking: salons, cleaners, tutors, trades, laundries, studios, anyone who sells time or a service at a price.

Signs you need one

• Bookings take several messages. Times offered, times declined, a price confirmed, a reminder sent.
• People try to book outside your hours. Evening enquiries that wait until morning often go to whoever answers first.
• The price depends on options. Size, extras, number of items. If you work it out by hand for every enquiry, a system can do it as they choose.
• No-shows. Automatic reminders, and deposits where they make sense, cut them down.
• Double bookings, or a diary only you understand.

Signs you do not, yet

• Every job needs a visit or a conversation first. Building work, design projects, anything quoted after a survey. A good enquiry form is the right tool.
• Low volume. A handful of bookings a week, happily handled.
• Your customers prefer to call, and you like it that way.

What a good booking flow looks like

LonDry is a concept laundry collection site we designed and built to show how this should work. It is a demonstration, not a real business. Booking a collection takes five steps, and the price updates as you choose, across washing, ironing, dry cleaning, bedding and specialist items.

A few things it gets right, and that any booking flow should:

• The price is visible before you commit, and it changes as you choose. No surprises at the last step.
• Every price is on one page. LonDry's pricing page says every price on it includes VAT.
• Small steps, one question at a time. Easier on a phone, and people are less likely to give up halfway.
• Plans can change. LonDry lets you change or cancel any time before the driver sets off, without a phone call.

Off the shelf, or built for you?

There are good off-the-shelf booking tools, and for a simple appointment diary they are often the right answer: quick to set up, paid monthly.

A booking system built for you makes sense when your pricing has rules a generic tool cannot express, when bookings need to feed another system, such as your accounts or your routes for the day, or when the subscription fees across all your staff add up to more than a build. We wrote more about that decision in off-the-shelf or bespoke.

What it costs

On our estimator, a small booking or ordering website is £4,300 to £6,600. With online card payments it is £5,000 to £7,950. Customer accounts, automatic reminders and links to your other systems are extra, and each is listed separately so you can choose.

Next step

Count how many messages your last ten bookings took. If it is more than two or three each, try our estimator, or tell us how you take bookings today. You can also see how LonDry was put together.