When we try to encourage our customers to add online booking to their website the question which always comes up is 'How can I be sure my competitors won't book me up?'. At Intersalon we recognised this in the early day and built in a number of safe guards that reduced the risk.You can limit the number of 'Open Appointments' any one customer can have before allowing them to access the online booking system and of course you can disable their access totally if you feel they are not genuine customers.

Both of these go some way but the only true safe guard to avoid this and to also reduce the costs of no shows is to ask for a desposit at the time of booking. For these reason we decided when we built the new booking wizard designed for mobile and full websites we decided that we should add an option to take a deposit before the appointment is confirmed.

We have launched the deposit system we support for PayPal but we will be adding other payment gateways as the system develops. The 'Online Booking Settings' allow you to easily request the size of the deposit as a percentage of the full service costs. As well as adding the appointment into the planner the deposit and the payment status will be shown in the 'Orders' section of the Retail module.

If you have any questions or would like to enable despoits on your online booking system then please contact our support team.