Charging a deposit for your online bookings is a great way to help prevent no shows and to get some form of guarantee from the client that they are serious about their booking.
Typical online bookings take a client through 3 steps:
Choosing services.
Choosing a staff member and a date and time.
Entering their information for the booking.
When you include a deposit, there is a forth step that gets added, where the client gets redirected to the payment processor to enter their credit card details before the booking is confirmed.
Before activating this, you will need to have an account with one of your Online Payment partners. These can be found by clicking on 'My Business' and then on 'Integrations'. SalonBridge has negotiated a low rate of 3.25% + R2.00 (Ex VAT) for credit card transactions with PayFast. It is free to signup and start accepting payments.
Choose an Online Credit Card Processor and activate it. You will be asked for your account details such as a Merchant ID and Merchant Token. These are provided by the payment processor:
Once activated, go to your Online Bookings section:
From your Online Bookings section, scroll down to where it allows you to enable, or disable 'Require a secure deposit'. You are also able to choose the deposit percentage you want to charge before a booking is made. Once you have enabled it, click on 'Save':
