Booking portal or own salon website: what fits hairdressers?

A booking portal puts the salon into a directory where people search who do not have a hairdresser yet. Your own salon website reaches people who already know the salon's name or find it through a local search. Those are two different groups, which is why “portal or own page” is rarely a question about software.

It is a question about where your salon's appointments should come from – and who owns the relationship with the clients afterwards. This article works out the differences without recommending either route across the board: for a newly opened salon and for one with a full appointment book, the answer comes out differently.

The most important difference is not the booking journey but what is left afterwards. If a client books through your own page, the name, the contact details and the appointment history lie in the salon's system. If they book through a portal, the relationship lies there first – and the salon may see only the appointment, not the full contact.

In practice that decides what you can do when a regular has not been in for six months. With your own data you write to them. Without your own data you wait for the portal to send them something – possibly with an offer from the salon two streets away beside it.

So with every portal, settle three points: which contact details does the salon actually receive? May it write to the clients itself? And what happens to the clients won through the portal when the contract ends? The answers differ considerably between providers and are rarely on the home page.

A portal solves one particular problem well: it brings people who do not know the salon and were not looking for it either. That is valuable in three situations – a new opening with no client base, a move to a different area, and free capacity that cannot be filled any other way, on a Tuesday morning for instance.

In those cases the arithmetic is simple: a chair standing empty brings nothing. An appointment through the portal brings the revenue minus the commission, and that is more than nothing. As long as the brokering produces additional appointments and replaces none, the portal is working for the salon.

The arithmetic turns unfavourable the moment the portal brokers appointments that would have come about without it. That is exactly what happens with regulars who type the salon's name into the search box, see the portal as the first hit and book there. The salon then pays a commission for a client it already had. How many such cases there are shows only if you look in the client list – which is why that look is worth taking once a quarter.

The commission is the visible part of the price. Beside it stand three items that never appear on the invoice and take effect all the same.

The first is the neighbourhood. On a portal page the salon stands between competitors, sorted by criteria the portal determines. Whoever wants to be found there no longer competes on craft and relationship but on position in a list – and on reviews whose rules the portal likewise sets.

The second is how prices are presented. A portal compares services by their names and prices. For hairdressing work, where the effort depends on hair length, starting colour and condition, that is a coarse simplification, and it invites comparisons that do not hold up professionally.

The third is dependence. When a substantial share of appointments comes through a channel somebody else operates, that somebody decides on terms, visibility and presentation. They can change them without asking. This dependence is not an accusation against portals – it is their business model – but it belongs in the decision.

For most salons the practical answer is not “either or” but a division of labour: the portal takes on winning new clients, your own page takes on the regulars and the rebooking. That works, but it demands one technical condition.

Both routes have to write to the same calendar. Two separate appointment books inevitably lead to the case where two people are booked for two o'clock and one of them has to be cancelled again – the most expensive mistake in this article, because it lands directly on the client.

On top of that, a rule for bringing people across is worth having. Whoever arrives through the portal and leaves satisfied should learn on the way out how to book directly next time – as a card, as a note on the receipt, as a sentence at the desk. That handover is the only way to turn rented reach into a client relationship of your own, and it costs nothing beyond the habit of doing it. Check your portal contract beforehand, though: some providers set out expressly what you may say to a client they brokered.

The question usually arises not at the start but after two or three years – and it arises quietly, because the monthly invoice has become a habit. There are three usable signs.

The first: the share of portal bookings in total appointments falls, but the commission total stays the same or rises. That points to the portal increasingly brokering regulars instead of bringing new people.

The second: you recognise the names. If the list of brokered appointments consists mostly of clients you know personally, the brokering is no longer brokering.

The third: the appointment book is full anyway. A portal that fills capacity helps; a portal that manages a waiting list only costs. In that case the step is rarely a hard exit but a reduction – fewer bookable times through the portal, more through your own page, and a close look at the notice period before anything is changed.