An appointment booking system for a small business: what to ask for
Phone calls, Instagram DMs and a paper calendar work until the day they do not. Online booking is the one feature small service businesses ask for most, and it is also the one where "almost working" is worse than nothing: a double booking costs you a customer.
The five things every booking system needs
- Services with durations. A 45-minute cut and a 2-hour colour cannot share the same slot logic.
- Availability per person. Opening hours, days off, each staff member's own calendar.
- Free-slot calculation on the server. The customer should only see times that are actually free, and the final check must happen when the booking is saved, not in the browser.
- Confirmation and reminders. An e-mail when the booking is made and, ideally, one the day before.
- An owner view. A calendar where you cancel, reschedule and mark no-shows.
Everything else — deposits, customer accounts, SMS, waiting lists — is a bonus.
The request
Build a booking website for my salon. Services with prices and durations, three stylists with their own working hours (Tuesday to Saturday 10-18), online booking where the customer picks a service, a stylist, a date and a free slot and gets a confirmation e-mail. Customers can sign in to see and cancel their bookings up to 24 hours before. Owner calendar per stylist with cancel and no-show. Send me a summary of tomorrow's bookings every evening at 19:00.
The daily summary is a scheduled job; the 24-hour cancellation window and the free-slot check are server-side rules. Saying them explicitly matters: if you only say "online booking", you get a form, not a system.
Clinics and anything with private data
For a clinic, a therapist or a tutor the extra requirement is privacy: a patient must see only their own appointments, staff see all. That rule has to live in the database, not just in the page. Malpera enforces it there and tests it with accounts that should be blocked before the site can be published. Ask for it anyway, in one sentence: "patients see only their own appointments".
Deposits and no-shows
If no-shows hurt, ask for a deposit at booking time. Stripe is connected to your own account; you decide the amount and whether it is refundable. Many salons find that even a small deposit cuts no-shows by half.
What it costs
A booking site like the salon request above takes 3-5 minutes to build and around 150 credits on Malpera — within the free welcome credits for a first version. Hosting, SSL and e-mails are included; your own domain needs the Starter plan at €19 a month. Compared with a booking SaaS at €25-60 a month plus a separate website, it is usually cheaper and, more importantly, it is your site: the booking page, the services page and the gallery are one thing.
See the salon demo for what the result looks like.