How to take bookings online for a small business

Right now you're taking bookings in a DM. Someone asks if Thursday works, you check your phone, you say yes, you forget, and then at some point you double-book two people and have to disappoint one of them. That's the actual problem. Not that you look unprofessional, but that your calendar lives in four different conversations.

A booking page fixes it, and setting one up takes about twenty minutes. What takes longer is getting four settings right: the notice period, the duration, the deposit, and where the thing happens. Get the notice period wrong and a stranger can book you for 6am tomorrow while you're asleep. Set it to 24 hours before you do anything else.

Brian cuts hair in Nairobi at KSh 800 a visit and learned that one the hard way.

The notice period is the setting that protects your life

A notice period is the minimum gap between someone booking and the appointment happening. Sailo has one on every service. It's a single number and it is the difference between a booking page that works for you and one that works against you.

Set it to 24 hours.

Not zero, which is what most people leave it on, and which means a person can book your 7am on a Sunday at 11:40 on Saturday night while your phone is charging in the other room. Not 48 hours either, unless you genuinely need a day and a half of preparation, because a two-day notice period quietly kills every booking from someone who decided this morning. And "decided this morning" is a large share of how service businesses actually get booked.

Twenty-four hours means the worst case is you find out tonight about tomorrow. You can live with that.

There are two exceptions worth knowing. If your service needs preparation you have to buy, like a cake or a catering order, make the notice period long enough to shop. If your service is genuinely walk-in-adjacent, like a barber with a chair sitting empty, you might drop it to four hours during working days, but do that with your eyes open and not because you forgot the setting existed.

Duration is the slot you lose, not the job you do

The mistake is entering the length of the work. Enter the length of the hole in your day.

Brian's fade takes 35 minutes. The slot is 50. The extra 15 is the chat, the sweep, the card machine, and the two minutes where the client stands up and remembers a question. If he lists it as 35 minutes and books three in a row, he's 45 minutes behind by lunch and the fourth client is sitting on a plastic chair being annoyed.

Sam does mobile nails in Manchester at £35 a set. Her gel set takes 60 minutes of actual work. Her slot is 90: fifteen to set up her table and lamp in someone's kitchen, sixty to work, fifteen to pack down and get her kit back in the car.

Write the honest number. Nobody has ever cancelled because a haircut was listed as 50 minutes instead of 35.

Travel time is where mobile services fall apart

If you go to the customer, your duration has a second job: it has to contain the journey, or you have to block the journey separately.

Kilimani to Westlands at 5pm is not fifteen minutes, and the map app is being optimistic. Salford to Didsbury on a Friday is not what it says either. Both of these are things you know from your own life and then somehow forget when you're filling in a form.

Three ways to handle it, in order of how well they work:

1. Build travel into the duration. A 90-minute service becomes a 150-minute slot in the area you have to drive to. Ugly on the page, honest in practice.
2. Set a last bookable slot earlier than you think. If you want to be home by 7, don't let anyone book at 5. Set your availability to end at 4.
3. Sell by area, not by time. North side Tuesdays and Thursdays, south side Wednesdays and Fridays. Put it in the service description. Buyers respect it more than you expect, and it stops you crossing the city twice in a day for two £35 appointments.

The version of this that costs you money: accepting a booking on the far side of town in the last slot of the day, at your standard price, and then spending 70 minutes in traffic you can't bill for. Do that twice and you've worked a full extra day for free that month.

Location is one field with three real answers

Sailo lets you set a location on a service. Use it properly, because it's the field that generates the most confusion in the fewest characters.

• At your place. Give the address, plus a landmark. "Above the pharmacy, blue door" saves you four messages.
• At theirs. Say which areas you cover and what happens outside them. Silence here means someone in a town 40km away books you at your normal rate.
• Online. Say which tool and who sends the link. If it's you, say when: "Zoom link sent with your confirmation."

Do not leave it blank and plan to sort it out in the messages. The messages are what you were trying to escape.

Deposits are the only thing that actually fixes no-shows

Reminders reduce no-shows. Deposits end them. There's no third option that works.

A person who has paid nothing loses nothing by not turning up, and a small number of them will discover that. It isn't malice, mostly. Something came up and yours was the only appointment with no cost attached to breaking it.

Size it like this: big enough to hurt, small enough to pay without thinking. For Brian's KSh 800 cut, that's KSh 200. For Sam's £35 set, £10. As a rule, somewhere between a fifth and a third of the price, rounded to a number that looks deliberate. A KSh 50 deposit protects nothing. A KSh 600 deposit on a KSh 800 service will lose you bookings from people who were going to turn up anyway.

Then write the policy in one line and put it in the service description, not in a terms page nobody opens:

KSh 200 deposit to hold the slot. Cancel or move it more than 24 hours ahead and the deposit carries to your next booking. Inside 24 hours, or no-show, and it's gone.

"Carries to your next booking" does more work than "non-refundable". It's the same money and it feels enormously different, and the person who had a genuine emergency comes back instead of vanishing out of embarrassment.

What Sailo won't do about that deposit

This is the honest limitation, and for bookings it's the one that matters.

If the deposit comes by bank transfer, or into an M-Pesa till number you've written into your payment instructions, Sailo doesn't process it and can't see it. Sailo cannot tell you the money arrived. Only your bank can. The booking sits there marked as awaiting payment until you go and look, and if you don't look, you either hold a slot for someone who never paid or lose one for someone who did.

So build the checking into your day. Twice: once mid-morning, once in the evening, at times you'll actually keep. There's a longer piece on getting this right without refreshing your banking app forty times a day in how to know a bank transfer actually arrived.

Two other things that are true and worth saying. There's no Sailo app, so your bookings live in a browser rather than behind an icon with a red badge on your home screen. And if you want deposits confirmed automatically, that means card payments, which need a connected Stripe account and cost 1–3% of the goods. On a £10 deposit the commission is five pence. The subscription is the real decision, and at eight bookings a week it probably isn't worth it yet.

The confirmation message, word by word

Send it within the hour, from wherever you already talk to customers. Most sellers do this from WhatsApp, and if that's already your order channel then how to take orders on WhatsApp is worth reading alongside this.

It needs six things:

1. The day name and the date. "Tuesday 14 August, 3pm." Not "the 14th at 3." Including the day name prevents an entire genre of no-show where someone had the right date and the wrong Tuesday in their head. This is the cheapest fix in the whole article.
2. The duration. So they don't schedule something 40 minutes later.
3. The address, plus a landmark. Or the call link.
4. What they need to do beforehand. Wash your hair, clear a table, have the file open, park on the street not the drive.
5. Your number. Not just your handle.
6. The cancellation policy in one sentence. Again. They didn't read it the first time.

Reminders: twenty-four hours, then two

Send a reminder the day before and a short one on the morning. Do it yourself, from your phone, and keep it to two lines.

Hi Amara, seeing you tomorrow (Thursday) at 3pm at yours in Lavington. Reply here if anything's changed.

"Reply here if anything's changed" is the whole trick. You're giving them a cheap way to cancel, which sounds like a bad idea and isn't. A cancellation at 4pm the day before is a slot you can refill. A no-show at 3pm is a slot you can't. Make it easy for people to tell you bad news early and you'll get told early.

Worked example: Brian in Nairobi

Three services on his page. Cut, KSh 800, 50 minutes. Cut and beard, KSh 1,200, 70 minutes. Home visit, KSh 1,500, 90 minutes, and the description says which estates he covers.

Notice period: 24 hours on the home visit, 4 hours on the shop services, because a chair sitting empty at 2pm is worth filling and he's there anyway.

Deposit: KSh 200 on shop services, KSh 500 on home visits, because that's the one where he's driving. He put his M-Pesa till number in the payment instructions field, since that's how everyone pays him already and always has. Sailo handles the booking and the calendar; the money goes exactly where it went before, and Sailo takes nothing from it.

Last slot: 5:30pm, not 7pm, because he learned that a 7pm home visit in Karen means getting home at 9:15.

The deposit did more for his no-shows than the reminders ever did. The thing he'd change if he started again: he set the home visit duration to 60 minutes at first, matching the actual work, and spent three weeks arriving late to everything before he worked out why.

The awkward conversations

They didn't pay the deposit. Don't hold the slot silently. Message once, politely, with the till number again, and say the slot releases at a specific time. Then release it. If they message afterwards claiming they sent it, what to say when a buyer says they paid covers how to handle it without accusing anyone of anything.

They cancel inside 24 hours, first time, genuine reason. Carry the deposit anyway. You keep the customer, you lose nothing, and the policy stays intact because you applied it as written and then chose to be kind on top.

You have to cancel. Refund the deposit in full, same day, and offer a specific alternative slot rather than "let me know when suits". Illness happens. Vagueness is what loses the customer.

Do these four things today

Set the notice period to 24 hours. Change every duration to the size of the hole in your day, not the length of the job. Add a deposit between a fifth and a third of the price, with "carries to your next booking" in the description. Move your last bookable slot 90 minutes earlier than feels necessary.

Then take one week of your existing DM bookings and put them through the page instead. If selling time is going to sit alongside selling something you made once, how to sell digital products and services online explains why the two need almost opposite handling.