Splurge London: booked and paid for, without leaving the page.

A service business losing the bookings that arrive at ten at night.

Splurge is a personal shopping and styling concierge in London: three hours at £250, a full day at £450, spent walking the shops with an honest second opinion at your side. It is a one-person business, which is the whole appeal and also the whole problem.

Enquiries do not arrive during office hours. They arrive late in the evening, when someone has a wedding in three weeks and nothing to wear. A contact form that sits unanswered until morning loses that person, because by morning they have found somebody else.

Book it and pay for it in one go, on her own site.

Most small service sites hand the customer to a third-party booking tool at the exact moment they decide to commit. The page changes, the branding changes, and a good proportion of people quietly stop. We kept the whole thing in one place.

• Real availability, not a request formThe calendar shows what is genuinely free. Session lengths have their own windows by day of the week, and the server re-checks the slot at the moment of payment, so two people cannot take the same afternoon.
• Card taken on the pagePayment happens on her site, in the payment provider's own styling rather than a restyled imitation, because a payment form that looks hand-built reads as untrustworthy. Card, Apple Pay and one-click return payment are all live.
• A calendar the owner actually controlsShe can block a whole day, a morning or a date range, enter bookings she took by phone, mark them paid, and pause bookings entirely with a message to customers. Every rule feeds the one availability check, so the public calendar and the payment step can never disagree.
• Gift vouchers and a seasonal routeBoth session lengths sell as vouchers valid twelve months, paid for on the page, which opens a second way to buy for the people shopping for someone else.
• She never has to open the payment dashboardA signed webhook marks the booking paid and emails her once. The booking list shows what was paid and what is still owed, so the site is the only screen she needs.

The admin screen is the part that decides whether a site like this survives.

Booking systems are usually sold on the customer-facing calendar. In practice they are abandoned because of the back office: the owner cannot block a holiday, cannot enter the booking that came in by phone, and ends up keeping a second diary on paper. Within a month the website's calendar is wrong and nobody trusts it.

So the admin screens got the same attention as the public pages, and every rule she sets there folds into the single function the customer calendar, the booking form and the payment check all read. There is no second set of rules to drift out of step.

Related services: website development · web design in Essex