Short answer: a booking app and a website do different jobs, and most salons need both. Booking platforms are excellent at taking bookings, and their marketplaces can bring new clients, usually for a fee on that first booking. But your listing on someone else's marketplace sits next to every other salon in town. Your own website is where you show what makes your salon different, get found for the treatments you want more of, and send clients to book directly through your system.
Many salons we speak to have let their booking app become their website. It's quick, it's free or cheap, and clients can book. The trouble is that it was built to sell the platform's marketplace, not your salon.
On a marketplace, you're one salon in a list. On your own website, you're the only one.
What booking apps do well
- Online booking, deposits and reminders
- Client records and rebooking
- A marketplace that can bring in new clients
Keep using them for all of that. The issue isn't the booking system. It's relying on it to do the job of a website.
Where it falls short
- New clients through the marketplace cost you. Platforms such as Fresha charge a fee on a new client's first booking when they come through the marketplace, and the client is shown your competitors on the way.
- It's hard to stand out. Every salon page looks the same: a list of services and a price.
- It doesn't rank for what you specialise in. If you want more balayage, extensions or bridal work, you need pages about those things.
- You don't own it. Change platform and your page, reviews and links go with it.
How to use both
- Your website is the front door. A page for each treatment you want more of, your team, your style and your reviews.
- Your booking system is the till. Every "book" button on your site goes straight into your booking system, not the marketplace.
- Your Google profile links to your website, and its booking link goes to your own booking page where you can.
- The marketplace is a channel, useful for new clients, but not the only way anyone finds you.
We've written about why booking online doesn't stop no-shows, and what does.
We build websites for hairdressers and salons with a page for every treatment, your team shown properly and booking one tap away. See what it costs in our salon website cost guide.
