Should your small business website take online bookings?

If you take bookings by phone, you may be wondering whether online booking on your website would save you work or just give you one more thing to look after. This article covers which businesses it suits, what a good booking system has to do and what to check before you switch it on.

Which businesses online booking suits

Online booking helps most when you sell services of a known length: a clinic, a salon, a garage, a consultant who sells hours. The customer sees the free slots, picks one and gets a confirmation without calling you.

You see the benefit in three situations:

• customers call outside opening hours and nobody answers,
• the phone keeps interrupting you while you are with another customer,
• people forget their appointment and do not turn up.

For work that needs a conversation or an assessment first, such as a renovation or a custom project, an open calendar does not help. There, a well-built quote request form works better, with a few questions that tell you what the person wants.

Online booking replaces a simple phone call. It does not replace a conversation about what needs doing.

What a good booking system does

A good system shows only the slots that are really free. That means one calendar that holds both phone bookings and website bookings. Two calendars kept apart will sooner or later put two customers in the same slot.

Beyond the calendar, check that the system:

• knows how long each service takes and the gap between appointments,
• sends a confirmation straight away and a reminder before the appointment,
• lets the customer cancel or move the booking on their own,
• asks only for name, phone number and service,
• shows the booking button on the first screen on a phone.

The reminder is the part many businesses skip. It is also what cuts no-shows, because people remember in time or free the slot for someone else.

An external booking page or booking inside your site

There are two technical routes. The first is a button on your site that sends the customer to a booking page hosted by someone else. The second puts booking straight into your own page, in your site's design.

The difference matters once you pay for ads. If the booking happens on another page, you often lose track of which ad brought the customer. With booking inside your site, you can send a conversion event to Google Analytics for every booking made.

Common mistakes

Most problems are not technical. They are setup details that make people give up or trip you up.

• The website calendar does not sync with the one you use for phone bookings.
• The form asks for details you never use, such as a full address.
• No reminder goes out before the appointment.
• Nobody counts how many bookings come from the site, or from which sources.
• The slots on show ignore holidays and days off.

A checklist before you launch

Before you tell customers, make a test booking exactly the way they would.

1. Open the site on a phone and find the booking button without searching for it.
2. Make a booking and count the steps and fields you went through.
3. Check that the confirmation arrived and the slot disappeared from the calendar.
4. Move the booking from the link you received, then cancel it.
5. Check in Google Analytics that the booking shows up as an event.

If any step fails, fix it before launch. A customer who hits an error on their first booking rarely tries a second time.

In short

Online booking on your website makes sense when you sell services of a known length and the phone eats your time. What matters is one calendar, reminders and tracking every booking. If you want the team to build booking into your site and track it, see our services.