eCommerce isn’t just for retail businesses. Service businesses around the world are realizing the potential that online booking offers.

Your subscription to Blue Sail Agency provides you with an online booking form from which customers can place bookings and optionally, pay for them. Your booking form will answer key questions that customers need before they can commit to a booking, including:

• What are your services?
• What do they cost?
• When are you available to deliver them?

While not all customers feel comfortable booking online, the booking form serves as an excellent pricing calculator so that customers can understand the general pricing of your services and your availability before they place a booking with you over the phone.

The online booking form that we’ve created is easy to use and highly customizable. Below, we’ll go through some of its many features.

Pricing

On the booking form, you have the option of displaying the actual prices for your services. As customers add or remove services to or from the form, the total cost will immediately update in the order summary box.

Alternatively, rather than providing the price of specific services, you can indicate the hourly cost of labour. Lastly, you have the option of omitting pricing from your booking form altogether. This is option is best where you simply want to collect information on the desired work so that you can provide the customer with a quote at a later time.

Primary Services

Our booking form allows you to define what we call ‘Primary Services’. These are typically main categories of services or service packages that you offer. For a home cleaning business, examples of these would be a Standard Clean, a Deep Clean, and a Move In/Move Out Clean.

The pricing of a Primary Service is highly flexible and can be based on one of the following:

• Base Fee + Primary Service Drivers (explained below)
• Base Fee
• Number of employees requested by customer * Number of hours requested by customer

Primary Service Drivers

A Primary Service Driver is a piece of information that ‘drives’ the cost of the primary service. For example, for our 'Home Cleaning - Standard' primary service, we can say that the following information can drive the price of this service:

• Number of bedrooms within the home
• Number of bathrooms within the home

These cost drivers are selectable by the user as shown below. For each Primary Service, you can define what the cost drivers are. Rather than number of rooms, you could use square feet. You could even charge an extra $10 for each pet in the house, for example.

Extra Services

Depending on your company, there may be extra services, or add-ons, that the customer should be able to choose from as they configure their service. In the case of a home cleaning business, examples of extra services might include:

• Cleaning of oven
• A load of laundry
• Cleaning of blinds

The pricing of each extra service is based on one of three options.

1. Base fee (eg. $15 for cleaning of Oven)
2. Per unit requested (eg. $10 per number of loads of laundry requested)
3. Per service driver selected (eg. $4 for cleaning of blinds per bathroom and $6 for cleaning of blinds per bedroom)

Job Length

Depending on your preference, the length of a job can be set as:

• A fixed length (eg. 1 hour)
• Based on the item total of the customer’s order (eg. 2 hours for every $100)
• Based on the number of hours the user explicitly indicates on the form (eg. 1 cleaner for 3 hours)

Availability

Before a customer can commit to an appointment, they need to know exactly when you are available to deliver the service. Our booking form features an advanced availability algorithm so that only available timeslots are presented to customers. This will prevent double booking from occurring.

Frequency

If desired, you can allow the customer to choose the frequency of the service (eg. weekly, monthly). Also, you can setup discount rates for various service frequencies to incentivize the selection of shorter service intervals. These ‘frequency discounts’ are only applied to future bookings so as to prevent the customer from selecting a frequency with the largest discount even though they only have an intention of doing business with you once. If a customer selects monthly service, for example, upon completion of the booking, monthly appointments will be automatically created in your calendar.

Coupons

Coupon codes can be entered by customers into the booking form. Coupon codes can be setup to offer a fixed discount (eg. $5) or a percentage discount (eg. 10%).

Payment Method

Depending on the needs of your business, at the time of booking, one of the following will be captured:

• The customer’s preferred payment method (eg. cash),
• The customer payment card information, which you can then charge in the future, or
• An actual payment from the customer via payment card

Depending on how you configure your booking form, you can give customers the option of paying offline (eg. cash, check) or using the payment card form provided.

Processing of payment card information is handled by Stripe, the world's most trusted online payment processor.

Security

As a matter of security and policy, Blue Sail Agency does not store critical payment card information on its servers. For information on how Stripe, the world's largest online payment processor, allows you to securely process transactions using our platform, please see this help article.