Nails
How to take payment online for a nail salon
Everything a nail salon sells is paid for at the desk, after the work, in the ten seconds a client is putting her coat on. Gift cards are the exception, and they are the thing people ask for in December and are told to come in for.
Taking money before the appointment changes two things at once: a deposit makes a no-show cost something, and a gift card is a sale to somebody who is not a client and may never become one.
This plan assumes the salon runs on Instagram and has no website of its own. If that is not you, the free check asks two questions and builds the version for your own business.
Five you can do yourself, four of them for nothing. Two we would do, $99. One thing to leave alone.
This catalogue lists 38 businesses under Nails, and 26 of them link an Instagram account. 19 of them publish no phone number, so somebody who wants to ring has to send a message instead. Not one of them publishes a price. Those are the businesses somebody is looking at beside you. Count them yourself: they are all on this site.
Step 1YouStart asking for a review at the moment the job endsfree
Get your short Google review link from the profile, save it in your phone as a text you can send in two taps, and send it to every customer as the job finishes, while you are still standing there. Not the next week by email.
Reviews move because of the share of customers who are actually asked, and most owners ask far fewer than they think. A text sent at the moment the work is done, with the person still holding their phone, is the version that gets answered.
Asking is allowed. Paying, discounting or offering anything in return is against Google's review policy, and that includes a dollar off, which owners assume is harmless. Do not filter who you ask based on how happy they seem. On a site built by us this is a button in the app on your phone: your link and your wording are already saved, so asking is one tap at the end of a job rather than something to remember and retype.
How long: ongoing
Step 2YouWrite down the five things customers ask on the phonefree
Write, in plain words, what you charge or your price range, exactly which towns you cover, what you do and do not take on, how soon you can come, and your licence or insurance number. One page, your own words, no polish.
This is the content of your website, and it is the part nobody else can write for you. Every build that stalls stalls here. Every generated page that reads as empty reads that way because this page did not exist, so the words had to come from somewhere generic.
If you only do one thing from this plan, do this one. It makes every later step cheaper and faster, including the ones you pay someone else for.
How long: an afternoon
Step 3You or usPut your prices, or a real price range, in writingfree
On the site and in the profile description, state what things cost. A range with what moves it is fine: a call-out is this much, a full job in a house this size is between these two numbers, here is what makes it more.
A large share of the phone calls you take exist only to ask the price. Putting a number up answers them without the call and filters out the people who were never going to book, so the calls you do get are closer to work.
If you genuinely cannot price without seeing the job, say that, and give the call-out fee and two real examples from past jobs. That is still more useful than "contact us for a quote".
How long: an afternoon
Step 4UsHave us build your site$99
We design and build the site, $99 one time, from the page of answers you wrote and the photographs you took. Three to five pages is the right size for a local business: what you do, the towns you cover, prices, who you are, how to reach you. If you already have a site, this replaces it, and the addresses people have already linked to are kept pointing at the right pages.
This is the only part of your presence you own, and the only one that can actually sell. It holds what a Google profile structurally cannot: your prices, a service explained in more than two sentences, your licence number, and the answers to the five questions that decide between you and the next listing. Being able to edit the wording of a site is not the same thing as the site being able to do that work. Where we could read yours, the line under this says what it is missing. Where we could not, judge it yourself: open it on your phone, press the number, and try to book a time without telephoning anybody.
After the build you pay the real running costs directly: a .com is roughly $12 to $20 a year and hosting is in the region of $5 to $30 a month. Check current prices, they move. A blog is not part of this and for a referral-driven trade it is not worth starting one.
How long: a week
Step 5UsPut Smart Chat on the sitefree
A chat widget that talks to your customer in English, asks what it needs to ask, takes the booking or the order, and sends it to you in your own language. You never answer in English.
The thing people try to fix is their English. The fixable thing is the channel. A phone call is the worst format there is: real time, an accent over a bad line, no pause to think. Written English is far easier, and a relay means you read the job in your language and reply in your language.
Included in the build. An unanswered chat box is worse than none, so this is only worth having if you will read what arrives. It captures a phone number in the first exchange, so an abandoned conversation is still a lead, and it says it is automated rather than pretending to be a person.
How long: an afternoon
Step 6You or usTake a deposit with a payment link, not a storevaries, see note
Create a fixed-amount payment link or button in Stripe, Square or PayPal and send it by text when you confirm a booking. No cart, no checkout, no store. $25 to $50 covers most service jobs, a percentage for anything large.
A booking with nothing at stake is a booking somebody cancels at no cost to themselves. A deposit changes that, and the link works over text on a phone, which is where you confirm jobs anyway. You do not need an online store to charge somebody.
You pay card processing on what you take. US online card rates have long been published around 2.9% plus 30 cents and vary by method and card type, so read the processor's current pricing page. State on the payment page what the deposit is for and whether it is refundable: almost every deposit dispute is a dispute about what was being paid for.
How long: an afternoon
Step 7YouExport your customer list somewhere you controlfree
Once a quarter, export your contacts out of whatever holds them, the booking tool, the phone, the social inbox, the point of sale, into a spreadsheet on your own drive. Names, numbers, emails, what they bought.
The list is the one channel nobody else can switch off. Instagram, Facebook and a Google profile all produce real customers, and in all three the contact list is rented. The failure is not gradual, it is an event: a lock, a hack, or a reach drop nobody announces.
The test that needs no vendor: if the platform you use most closed your account tomorrow with no appeal, how long until you could contact your existing customers again. If the answer is never, this is the cheapest gap on the list to close.
How long: an afternoon
Not yet
Leave this aloneDo not pay for ads yet
Hold off on Google Ads, Facebook Ads and boosted posts until there is somewhere for the click to land: a page that states your prices, your service area and how to reach you, and a way to answer the enquiry the same day.
Ads buy attention, they do not create a reason to hire you. Sending paid clicks to a profile with no photos or a page that does not say what you charge means you pay for every visitor and convert the same share you would have converted for free. The money disappears with nothing left behind.
Revisit when the profile is verified with real photos, the site states prices, and you reliably answer enquiries within a few hours. Then start small enough that a bad month does not matter, and count calls, not clicks.
This is the general plan for Nails. The free check asks what you want more of and what you have now, and will read your own website if you give it the address.
The businesses listed under Nails are at /c/nails.
Businesses we built sites for
Real companies, real websites. Open them and look: that is the only way to tell whether anybody is actually behind this.
Most of this plan is yours and costs nothing. The steps marked for us are the ones we would do, and what they cost is written on them. Nothing here is an offer you have to take: the plan is the same either way.