Imagine you’re running your Hair Salon and creating magic with your scissors. You are involved in giving final touches to a client and your phone starts ringing incessantly. You ignore once, twice, but it keeps disturbing you. This breaks your involved flow and your final touch is not as expected by the client. This situation would lose you the current client as well as the new one because of not being responsive.
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You might think of hiring a receptionist, but can they take calls 24×7? No, right. In such a situation, having a booking website would be a boon in your lap. People can visit your Website, look at your offerings, and book an available slot at any damn time. You just have to check your Website Dashboard for the day and get going with your art.
Apart from booking issues, a hair salon also faces other challenges like calculating prices for group booking, giving a bundle service discount, calculating coupon codes, disappointing clients in non-working hours, availability of staff and so much more. Setting up a Booking Website is the solution to it all!
Let us break it down gradually.
How to Set Up a Website and Enable Booking Feature
1) Domain Name and Hosting Provider
Having a name that reflects your persona is a must. There are services like GoDaddy and Hostinger that provide Domain as well as Hosting services in a package. There are Managed WordPress Hosting providers to help with hosting. Such hosting providers are designed specifically for WordPress. This will be a little technical part that you would need to swim through, after this, it’s going to be a cakewalk.
2) Choose a Salon Based Design Template
There are ample Websites that are providing Web Design Templates. Even the hosting provider you choose will provide you with a few templates for your Website. After choosing a template you love, you just have to start replacing your content and change the layout or color scheme wherever needed.
- Enhance the Homepage
- Enlist Salon Services
- Create a Dedicated Our Story page to highlight Brand Journey
- Client Testimonials to build trust in new visitors
- Connect and Privacy policy Page
3) Integrate Hairstylist Booking Software
Now, to create an outstanding salon booking website, you would need a well-rounded Booking Plugin. BookingPress WordPress Booking Plugin passes all our tests with its multiple features. One Plugin can sort all your salon booking tasks. The global aspects of BookingPress include,
- Managing a multi-location salon
- Customizing individual schedules for each stylist under you
- Controlling payments and appointments from a single dashboard
4) Add Your Offerings
Now, you must bifurcate your hair salon services and list it out categorically. For instance, Hair Cut, Hair Spa, Hair Colour, Advanced Hair Treatment, Professional Hair Styling, and so on. Under these major categories, list out related services.
5) Add Your Staff Members
With BookingPress, you can allow members to choose from your stylists. If your staff is bifurcated by their expertise, then list them on your site and allow the users to select a stylist. This will help in two ways. One, manage your employees’ work load. And secondly, when the client comes for a service, they do not have to wait for someone to get free to attend them.
6) Personalize Your Booking Software
There are multiple other features for you to set up and personalize the booking experience for you as an admin and customers. Let us check them out one by one.
Set a Default Service Duration: Fix your salon days and time. The customers can book 24×7 while observing your available time slots. Set a global schedule and apply regular working hours, holidays, special days, and any other breaks.
Set Your Own Appointment Duration: Based on the services, you can set a custom appointment duration. Not all services have to be of similar duration and it can be changed as per your requirement. You can even offer options for clients to choose how long they would want a certain service.
Online Payment Processing: Choose among 15+ payment gateways to aid all your clients. You do not need to remember all the pending payments. The BookingPress feature would let you look at all the payment history and bifurcate it into online, manual, paid, and pending.
Email Notifications and Reminders: You are not just relieved of taking manual booking, but also of multiple calls and text reminders to the clients. With BookingPress you can automate that process so the clients would be notified about their booking on their chosen mode of communication.
Add Manual Appointments: Even if you receive random walk-ins, you can add a manual appointment for them on the dashboard so that the final report is available at one place without having to bifurcate between online bookings and manual walk-ins.
Staff Accounts: Create Staff Accounts so that your staff members can see what their day looks like and you can see each one’s work and contribution, thus aiding you in tracking performance. The client schedules can be customized individually based on their shifts and availability. They will have a separate dashboard to view their bookings.
Other Features: There are multiple other features that BookingPress provides for a smooth business working. Calendar View booking, group bookings, agile schedule, reports, statistics, translation ready, customized forms and checkout fields, tax integration, WooCommerce for selling salon related products, recurring appointments, waiting list, Zoom, Google Calendar, multiple salon locations, conversion tracking, and GDPR ready for you to be worriless!
Are you ready to Create a Booking Website for Hair Salon?
Did it feel like too much? Well, it can feel overwhelming to understand it altogether, but when you start doing it, it will feel easier than you imagine. You just have to think of the betterment of your salon services and expanding the reach of your salon business, and rest assured, you will get technical help at each point. From designing to writing, there are multiple free tools that would aid you in your Website launch journey.
The benefits of laying a salon booking system far outweighs the investments that you would make. The professional site setup would establish increased trust, will make customer scheduling easy, and minimize clashing. This will keep you focused on what you’re doing and not mess up that haircut due to incessant client inquiries!
Stop fretting, and start with the planning today itself. There are a lot of potential clients who are waiting to sit on your chair and get a refreshing after look.
FAQs
1) Will my Staff Members Get Complete Access to the Booking Platform?
You can define what permissions you give to your staff members. They can be given access to the data that is enough to keep their work going. Don’t worry, your data is secure with you.
2) Do I Need Coding Knowledge to set up my Website?
With AI Website Builders and other helpful plug-ins, you get drag-and-drop functionality for building a Website. It requires very little to no coding knowledge.
3) How Long will it take to build a hair salon booking Website?
A simple Website with less number of pages can be up and running within a month. However, if you are going for more complex designs and hiring professionals to build a Website, it can take 6 months to 1 year or even more based on internal coordination and final expectations.
4) Can it Cancel or Reschedule Appointments?
Well, when someone books a service, they must be given the flexibility to cancel or reschedule. Only then they will have the courage to book with you online. Imagine if you do not get a return or replace option in online shopping. You would think ten times before ordering, right!
