Looking for advice about Fresha and Treatwell.

[jenny1980]

Hi,

I am starting my own massage business working from home and looking for a bit of advice.

Firstly, I have been advised to use both Fresha and Treatwell to attract clients.

Can anyone give me any idea how successful either of these market places is for introducing new clients to the business.

Is anyone using both and do you have problems with 2 clients booking the same times in the different apps. What method do you use to get round this?

For me the reason to choose either of these softwares is to get access to their marketplace at the moment I am not so keen on their online booking, but see it as a necessary evil to get access to the marketplace. Am I wrong about this?


Thanks,

Jenny

 

[TheDuchess]

I used Treatwell. I have no experience with Fresha.

There are pros abd cons with these sites, be aware about the fees - Treatwell takes about half the client booking fee as commission as they charge VAT on their fee, but repeat bookings from the same customer are minimal.

Because Treatwell take a big fee on new introductions they have a vested interest in pushing new clients to you - this means they churn their customer base, discounting and promoting to get customers to try a new business instead of staying loyal. That’s a problem for a treatment where customers don’t really care who does the service like maybe a spray tan or a leg wax and just want a “deal”, less of an Issue where quality is important. Clients may treat themselves to a one off visit because they have a voucher, then it’s up to you to persuade them to return. In theory it will all balance out. I am in a tourist city so I could have a bottomless pit of new clients, none of whom return. I dealt with this by listing higher priced packages and services that were only available through Treatwell where I made enough money to be able to swallow the new client fee.

You may need to upload your client database on to Treatwell, they won’t charge you a new client fee for someone that is on your database. I wasn’t keen to share my data so I didn’t do this, I made sure my non Treatwell clients could rebook easily, and at better prices, so they didn’t book through Treatwell.

I didn’t advertise all my availability through Treatwell. It doesn’t take two minutes to block out an hour or two so it was simple to update my schedule several times a day. Basically I blocked out some time in the schedule and I updated these blocked out times every time I had a new booking direct. After a while I only advertised my off peak times/days.

You might be happy to have a booking free for all and accept the risk of a double booking, it doesn’t happen very often and you can usually contact a client and reschedule them. To make this less stressful, you might want to close down one platform on a daily basis after you get a certain number of bookings for that day so that you reduce the risk that you end up double booked and overbooked for the day.