You see the Hub. Your customers see something completely different — and when one rings up confused, it helps to know what they're actually looking at.
💡 Go through it yourself once. Open Settings → Booking Widget → Details and click Open in the Status card. Ten minutes booking your own appointment tells you more than any article — including which of your service names make no sense to an outsider.
The five steps
1. Choosing a location
If you have more than one site, customers pick which first. With a single location this step is skipped.
👀 Location names should be recognisable to a customer — the street or area, not an internal label.
2. Choosing services
Customers browse your categories, pick a service, then choose a tier — which is where the price and the staff member come in.
They can add more than one service to a single booking.
💡 This is where most drop-off happens. If your categories are named the way your industry talks rather than the way customers do, people can't find what they want and leave. See services, categories and tiers.
3. Choosing a date and time
Customers see available slots based on the staff member, their working hours, and your booking preferences.
👀 They only see what's genuinely available. If the calendar looks empty to them, something upstream is wrong rather than you simply being busy — work through my availability looks wrong.
4. Signing in or creating an account
Customers need an account to book. New ones create one; returning ones sign in.
👀 This is the step customers ring you about. A returning customer who's forgotten their password, or is trying a different email from the one they booked with last time, will get stuck here and assume your system is broken.
The fix is nearly always: use the email address they booked with before, or reset the password. Their booking history sits on that account, which is why it matters.
5. Confirming and paying
A summary of what they've chosen, your cancellation policy, your booking terms if you require them, and payment if a deposit applies.
Once confirmed they get a confirmation email — including whatever you've written in Important information. See every email Styler sends.
After they've booked
Customers can sign back in to see their upcoming bookings, and they get reminders 24 hours and 1 hour before their appointment.
Booking a course
Courses have their own path — customers see the course, its classes and its instructor, then enrol rather than picking a time slot. Only published courses set to Open to all customers appear. See Introduction to Classes & Courses.
"Business not found"
If a customer reports this, the link they've used is wrong or incomplete — usually an old link, or one that lost part of itself being copied into a bio.
Get your current link from Settings → Booking Widget → Details and check anywhere you've shared it. See where do I find my booking link?
FAQs
❓ Can customers book without creating an account?
No. The account is what holds their booking history and lets them manage appointments — and it's what makes a card available for deposits and fees.
❓ A customer says a service is missing.
Check Booking Enabled is on, that it's assigned to the location they're viewing, and that its tiers have staff. Any one of those hides it.
❓ Can customers cancel their own bookings?
Yes, subject to your cancellation window. Cancelling inside it counts as a late cancellation — see late cancellation and no-show fees.
❓ Does the widget work on a phone?
Yes — and that's how most customers will use it. Worth checking your own link on a phone rather than only on a desktop.