How customers book

Your booking page walks the customer through a short sequence. Which steps appear depends on what you sell, and the whole thing is designed to fail fast: anyone you cannot help finds out in the first ten seconds rather than the last.

The steps

Address. For work you travel to, this comes first. The customer enters where the job is, and it is checked against your territories before anything else happens.

This order is deliberate. There is no sense letting somebody choose a service, pick a time and enter their phone number only to be told at the end that you do not go out that far.

Service. What they want. Prices and durations can be shown here, and customers can be allowed to pick more than one service at a time.

Options. Any add-ons that go with the service, with the total updating as they choose.

Job details. For quote-priced work, this is where the customer tells you about the job instead of picking a slot.

Schedule. The times you can actually do. See Real availability.

Delivery. For hire, whether they are collecting or you are delivering.

Contact. Their name, email and mobile.

Payment. For prepaid services, they pay here. For postpaid ones this step does not appear.

Confirmation. Done, with the details repeated back.

Booking or requesting

Not everything can be booked instantly. A service prices itself and has a duration, so it can offer real slots and be booked outright. A quote-priced service cannot, so the customer sends you the details and you come back with a price.

You can also set a service to Estimate first deliberately, even when it could be booked instantly, for work you would rather look at before committing.

Both paths end in the customer having done something useful and you having their details.

What the customer gets afterwards

A confirmation, and a link they can use to look the booking up later. If you have the relevant notifications switched on they will get reminders as the date approaches. See Notifications.

What is next

Next: Real availability.