Online salon booking platforms like StyleSeat, Schedulicity, and Vagaro are changing the way people connect with salons and stylists. These online salon booking platforms have not only bridged the gap between beauty professionals and clients but have also redefined how beauty and wellness based websites should be built.
Besides the above-mentioned names, there are many more players that have built their niche in this growing beauty and wellness industry marketplace. This booming business idea recently caught FATbit team’s eye, and we initiated a thorough analysis on it to provide some valuable insights to aspiring entrepreneurs looking forward to build a similar website.
Here are our business model & website feature findings:
Business and Revenue Model
On an average, beauty professionals are able to book only 70% of their operating hours. Online salon booking platforms help them maximize this percentage by making the booking process seamless and offering bookings outside the operating hours. This in turn also helps clients avoid waiting in queue for appointments.
As for how these websites make money, following are the primary revenue channels:
- Commission cut on every appointment
- Subscription based service to allow stylists and beauticians for listing and running their business through the website
- On-site promotion for beauticians
Website Features
Website structure will be similar to any other service-based ecommerce website. The prime focus while building an online salon booking platform should be on features provided to salon owners, stylists, and style conscious people. So, let’s wait no more and uncover these features.
Homepage Highlights
Your target audience is style conscious people, so it is almost obligatory that you come up with a great homepage that scores high on graphics as well as on the UX. Here are the ingredients that you must include in your online salon booking clone script:
- A clear website message to set the right expectations in visitors
- A custom search box for beautician search
- Separate How It Works sections with engaging CTAs that briefly explain clients and beauticians how to proceed with the site
- A section dedicated to testimonials from beauticians on how the website has helped them in growing their business
- Quick links to beautician search result for popular categories and cities with effective use of graphics
Apart from that, the footer area will have the usual links to content based pages, other offered services, and social media plugins.
Design your website as per your requirements
Beautician/Salon Search
As just mentioned, the salon search feature should be provided on the homepage itself. Important input fields for the search feature include:
- Text field for salon name, service, or professional’s name
- Location (zip or city with auto-complete feature)
- Date (drop-down calendar)
- Time (drop-down menu)
In addition to that, to deliver a richer experience to your target audience, place quick links to popular service categories and cities at the bottom of the search tool box.
Salon Search Results
The salon search results should be displayed with a sufficient filtering options and information to help out client in finding the best match in accordance to what they are looking for. Here are a few highlights:
- Filtering options based on price, online booking availability, offering discounts, and professionals of popular brands
- Listed results with stylist’s basic info and address
- Rating/ recommendations for each listed stylist
- Location in map-view in a side panel which should update as a user selects or hovers over a listed result
Salon/Stylist Page
The Stylist/Salon page should be loaded with lots of information and rich features, so that clients can be assured that they chosen the right stylist, as well as can go about the booking process easily. Here are components you need to consider for the Stylist page:
- Complete address & Contact info, as well as an option to message stylist on the website
- Services offered with pricing details
- Brief bio of the stylist
- Options to visit their social media profile as well as share their profiles with friends on social media
- A grid of photographs of the past work by the stylist
- Option to like and comment on photographs, as well as save them for future reference
- Business hours
- Location in map-view
- Availability calendar
- Reviews/recommendations with an option add a new one
- And of course, the booking option
Booking an Appointment
Clicking the booking button should take clients to the booking form, which would ask them following details:
- Service to opt
- Time and date
- Whether it is their first time with the stylist/salon
- And personal message to the stylist
This will be followed by the checkout process, where clients need to provide their credit details and finalize the order.
An intuitive checkout process can improve your conversion rate considerably
Learn more
User Profile Options
Client profile should be packed with a number of value-added features so that a rich user experience can be delivered. Apart from the usual profile and account management options, you need to include following features in your clone script to make an impact on clients:
- Appointment section that list all past and upcoming appointments with their timing information as well as status
- Professional section that will list all the stylists/salons a user has taken service from or have saved during past searches
- Section to list all the photographs a user has liked on the website
- Option to make a new search
- Option to invite friends to join the website
- Option to invite a beauty professional to list his business on the website
Here we have covered all the features that a salon booking clone website should have in its script for clients. Now let’s take a step forward, and discuss all the powerful features that will help beauty professionals in running their business successfully through your website.
Sign-up for Professionals
For any e-commerce business, it is important that it has a well-thought-out registration process for the service provider. And it is not just about the steps involved in the registration process, but also how the landing page for professionals is designed. So let’s begin with enlisting the features that should be present on the registration page for salons and beauticians.
- Highlight how your website will minimize their unused operating hours
- Enlist all the benefits that beauty professionals will get with you – booking outside the business hours, real-time management of appointment scheduling, knowing clients’ behavior, etc.
- Also, feature a few popular stylists listed with your business
- And lastly, an engaging CTA that motivates users to sign up
Following are the details that should be asked in the sign-up process:
- The process would begin with usual sign-up details – name, email address, etc.
- Type of service – hairstyle, makeup, hair color, etc.
- Association with salon
- Salon/professional practice address and contact details
- Services offered with their duration and price
- Business hours
- Set up profile with photographs of the past work (like a portfolio)
- Add client database if the professional has maintained it in digital format (whether on in-house computer or any other salon booking website)
With that, the registration process for beauty professionals will be completed.
Beauty Professionals Profile
On completing the sign-up procedure, professionals will land on their profile’s home page, which should give them lots of useful features and options. These features should also be well-arranged into paginated tabs. Let’s list these tabs one-by-one.
-
Client: To feature all the clients ever scheduled for an appointment with options to add, edit and delete them
-
Photos: To keep the portfolio with similar add, edit and delete options
- Schedule: A section where the schedule chart will show the empty and booked time slots
-
Business stats: This area will store the business’s performance over the time – its revenue, client served, etc.
Other than these essential tabs, following features & functionalities must also be fit into the salon booking platform clone script:
- A section that highlights upcoming appointments
- Update salon/practice details (such as adding a new service, updating business hours, etc.)
- View and select offered membership plan by the website
- View and select on-site promotion services offered by the website
- A communication channel to interact with the client
- Visit other professional’s profile just like a client
Here we have covered all the basic website features for building a online salon booking clone script. Now let’s cover a few more features that will add real value to you website.
Reward Program
Allow users to invite their friends to join the website and offer them rewards points in return, which can be used towards the payment for future appointments or for buying gift cards to popular online stores of the beauty industry. Additionally, also include inviting beauty professionals under this program.
Informative Blog
Beauty and health conscious people love to read different types tips that can make them look and feel better. So, if you want your target audience to stay on your website for long, then maintain an informative blog and regularly post beauty related tips on it.
Partnership
Partnering with cosmetic product firms is also a good idea. Under this program, allow these firms to sell their products on the website and cut a commission on the sales they make. This way you will have another revenue channel for your online salon booking business. All cosmetic products firms will readily partner with you since your website already have the audience that they target. Besides, offering beauty products to beauty-conscious people is a good feature from the UX point of view as well.
Give importance to user experience to make your website successful
Take ideas from experts
Final Comment
From the start, the marketing of your salon booking website should be focused on presenting it as a platform that connects clients with beauty professionals in a seamless way. For beauty professionals, you would certainly need to highlight the facts about their unused times. For clients, the selling point will be your website as a way to avoid the hassles of last-minute appointments.
Make sure that you act upon these factors smartly because the success of a product pretty much depends on how it is being presented to the target audience.
If you are already planning to build salon booking website for your region, then our UX focused design and development insights can certainly help you with the task.
Learn how much building a salon booking website will cost you
Request a quote here
