Practical advice for getting an owner-run business online and keeping it working. These articles cover the essentials a small site needs, taking bookings and enquiries, payments and deposits, reviews and trust, privacy and consent, with worked examples from clinics, shops, restaurants, letting agents and service trades.
A missed colour appointment is three hours of a stylist's day that cannot be sold to anybody else. The fixes run in a specific order, and deposits are not first.
Most practices leave prices off and ask people to ring. That decision is made for good reasons and it costs more enquiries than it saves.
Hair length, thickness and what the last salon did all change the price. A single figure is either a promise you break or a number that scares people off.
A deposit turns a free promise into a small commitment. It also turns some patients away. Here is where the line sits.
Deposits fix the bookings that were never going to happen. They also cost you the ones that were. The difference is which appointments you apply them to.
A website charges a fixed price for a fixed thing. A squash has never heard of this. Here is how to sell by weight without arguing about it at collection.
Produce does not post well and it does not wait. Collection slots and a fixed delivery round beat a courier for almost everything a farm shop sells.
Most handmade pricing covers the materials and quietly donates the labour. Here is how to build a price that survives contact with a busy month.
A stock count of one behaves differently from a stock count of fifty. So does a piece that does not exist until somebody buys it. Both need saying on the page.