Take bookings without a website

You don't need a website from us to take bookings, sell gift cards or get messages. Set up your business once, and we give you a page of its own, with an address that ends in /b/your-business, plus a booking form you can put on any website you already have.

Set up your business

1. In your dashboard, choose your business at the top of the menu, then open Business and click Business info.
2. Fill in your name, phone, address, regular hours and time zone. Customers see these on your booking page and in their emails.
3. Click Services, staff and more, then Appointments or Events, and add what customers can book. Each has a length, an optional price and an optional deposit.
4. Add your team under Team if customers should pick who they book with.

Everything saves as you type. There's nothing to publish: your booking page changes as soon as the change is saved.

Look at your page first

Setting up is free. Until you have the Business plan, nobody else can see your page, but you can: your editor and your dashboard show a private link, and the page shows a note that it's a preview. Send the link to a friend if you'd like a second opinion. Customers can't book through it yet.

Open it to customers

Open Business plan in your dashboard menu, choose yearly or monthly, and pay. The Business plan is $16 a month billed yearly, or $20 a month, and it includes bookings, gift cards, newsletters, review requests, payment requests and signed forms. Your page opens as soon as the payment goes through.

Share your booking page

Your page's address is at the top of every screen under Business, with a button to copy it. Put it in your social profiles, your email signature or a QR code. It shows what you take: bookings, class sign-ups, tables, gift cards, a contact form, a newsletter sign-up and a place for customers to write reviews.

The page opens once you have the Business plan, or Bookings or Reservations on their own.

Put it on a website you already have

1. Open Embed in your dashboard menu.
2. Next to the part you want (booking, gift cards, contact form…), click Copy code.
3. Paste it into your website's page, where the form should go. Most website builders have an "embed" or "custom HTML" block for this.

The form takes its space on the page and grows to fit. If you paste several, paste the second line only once.

Payments open in the whole window, because Stripe can't open inside a frame, and then come back to a page of ours with the booking or card on it.

Take table reservations

A restaurant can add Reservations ($10 a month, an add-on of its own: it isn't part of the Business plan). Open Business plan in your dashboard menu, or Reservations under Business, and choose Turn on reservations. It needs your Business plan or a website plan to be running first, and it's charged monthly to the card that plan uses.

Then open Reservations under Business to set up your tables. Guests reserve on your booking page as soon as it's on, or on any website you paste the Table reservations form onto from Embed. See Take restaurant reservations.

Answer questions with the chat

The Ask us chat is part of the Business plan. It's a small Ask us a question button on your booking page, and you can also paste it onto your own website from Embed. Customers type a question, like "Are you open Sunday?" or "Do you teach kids?", and get an answer straight away. What it can't answer, it offers to pass to you, and that lands in your Inbox.

It answers from what you've already entered here (your hours, your services and your FAQ list), and from your own website if you have one:

1. Open Ask us chat under Business.
2. Under Your website, type your website's address and click Read my website. It reads up to 8 of your pages, in under a minute, and skips any page your site asks automatic readers to stay out of.
3. Click Read it again after you change your website. It also reads it again about once a month by itself.
4. Add a few short rules under Instructions for the chat if you like, such as "For prices, ask them to call us."

The chat never makes up prices, times or promises, and it says plainly that its answers are automated. Questions to answer lists what customers asked that it couldn't answer, most asked first. Click Answer on one and it goes in your FAQ list, so the chat can answer it from then on. See Ask us chat for more.

Take payments

Open Payments and click Connect Stripe. Deposits, paid spots and gift cards go straight into your Stripe account, and we take no cut. See Connect Stripe.

Add people you already email

In Email list, Import reads a spreadsheet from Mailchimp, Square, Calendly or Google Contacts, or any list with a column of email addresses. Only import people who agreed to hear from you: you confirm that before anything is added, and anyone the file marks as unsubscribed is left out.

Reviews

A business with no website takes its own reviews. Your page has a Reviews section where customers pick a star rating and write a few words, and the button in your review-request emails opens the same form on a page of its own. Each review waits in Reviews for you to read it, and only the ones you choose to show appear on your page. You can also paste the form onto your own website from Embed.

If your customers also use Google, paste your Google review link into Business info. Your emails then add a quiet "Prefer Google? Review us there instead." line, and so does your page. Without a Google link, nobody is sent there. See Ask customers for reviews.

Get a website later

If you want a website too, open your business on the dashboard and choose Give it a website. We convert your current site or draft a new one, and your bookings, contacts, gift cards and services come with it.

Everything else works the same

Bookings, Reservations, Gift cards, Contacts, Reviews and Newsletter are the same screens a business with a website uses, so the help for each one applies. The only difference is where you find them: under Business in your dashboard menu.

What isn't here, because there's no website: pages, photos on your services and team, the signed-form pages and the online store. The store needs a website.