Website for massage therapists where time is the product
What you sell is measured in minutes. Thirty, sixty and ninety are three different amounts and three different shaped holes in the day, and for six weeks before Christmas half the people getting in touch are not booking for themselves at all.
The site runs on your own domain, with SSL, hosting and nightly backups in every plan. From €49 to €199 a month, excluding VAT.
Three moments in one week
Nothing here is unusual. It is simply what happens when the product is a length of time and there are three sorts of buyer for it.
Quarter to eight, before the first client
Somebody has asked for a Thursday and has not said how long they want. You can pencil in thirty minutes and risk having to rush, or ninety and risk holding an hour you never needed, and either way you have to write back and ask before you can write anything down. The question and the answer take longer than the booking would.
Four o'clock on a Tuesday in December
A gift card, please, for her mother. You write one out by hand, take the money, and it disappears into a wallet where it will sit until March. When it comes back it is a piece of card with a number on it and no way at all of telling whether it was already used in January.
Half five, and the company enquiry
An office up the road wants somebody in on Thursday mornings for a run of short appointments, invoiced to the company at the end of the month. That is a different arrangement from a private client with a personal booking: different pricing, different paperwork, and it does not sit comfortably in the same list as your sixty minute slots.
Four things built around the clock
There is more in the product than these. These are the four that suit a business sold by the half hour.
Thirty, sixty and ninety are three services
Each length is its own service with its own price and its own slot, so the person booking says how long before they say when, and the diary offers only what genuinely fits. Ninety minutes is not offered at half four if you finish at half five, while thirty minutes still is.
Gift cards and codes instead of paper
A gift card can be sold as an item of its own and redeemed with a code at the point of booking rather than remembered by anybody. In December that is the difference between a wallet full of handwriting and a list you can check. The same mechanism runs a quiet January offer if you want one.
Company clients kept apart from private ones
The customer register holds who is who, so the office you visit on Thursdays and the person who comes in every fortnight are not two identical looking entries in the same undifferentiated list. What you need at invoicing time sits with the company instead of scattered through old messages.
Moving an appointment without a phone call
Every booking has its own link for moving or cancelling. When a sixty minute slot on Wednesday is given up on the Tuesday evening, it is open again on the Tuesday evening, which happens to be exactly when somebody else is looking for one.
What the list can look like
Set your own names and your own amounts. The point is that a length sits behind every line, and the lines that are not simply a length get priced a different way.
Lines can be grouped, private appointments in one category and company work in another, each with prices of its own.
Questions massage therapists ask
That is how it is set up. Each length is a service of its own with its own price, and the times offered afterwards are the ones where that particular length still fits into the day.
The card is sold as an item and carries a code. Whoever uses it enters that code when booking, so you can see what has been sold and what has been redeemed without opening a drawer.
It does not have to be. Company work can be a quoted line rather than a bookable slot, and the companies sit in the customer register separately from your private clients.
No, though the lines people compare are worth writing down. Anything that genuinely depends on the arrangement can be a from-price or a quote instead of an amount you cannot hold to.
The asking and the agreeing stop being messages. People choose the length and the time themselves and get a confirmation immediately, and whatever you have on the web now can be imported so you are not starting from an empty page.
Between €49 and €199 a month, before VAT. Each plan carries your site on your own domain with SSL, hosting, nightly backups and support behind it. Text message sending is bought as prepaid credit.
More trades
- Foot health practitionersOne calendar for the phone and the web.
- Hair salonsBooking per chair and treatment length.
- BarbersA booking that takes ten seconds on a phone.
- Nail salonsThe three week refill books itself.
- Lash techniciansBookings that arrive while your hands are busy.
- Beauty and skin clinicsConsultation first, the course of treatments in the calendar.
- All trades
Put the diary and the gift cards in one place
Say what you offer and in which lengths, and a first version arrives with the services, the amounts and the booking already arranged. Change whatever you like directly on the page, and have the gift cards up well before December.
The site runs on your own domain, with SSL, hosting and nightly backups in every plan. From €49 to €199 a month, excluding VAT.