How to set up an online store for salon and shop experience for your clients in 2022?

While Shopify is primarily an eCommerce platform meant to help its clients sell products online, the platform's feature set also allows service businesses to set up an excellent online presence. Let us take you through an interesting read on how you can set up your online salon and shop experience with Shopify

The Salon and Shop Model

Salons across the world not only provide their professional services but are also channels of sales for professional beauty and care products for their clients. Many brands such as Loreal, Olaplex, Kerastase, etc. depend on clients' experiences using their products at a salon to make buying decisions. Similarly, clients prefer to buy products the salon uses in their treatments from the professional or the salon itself. As salons set up their online presence, enabling online shopping for these products for their regular customers becomes second nature, thus, forming the salon and shop model. Let's build a Shopify website that allows your clients to book appointments as well as order their favorite products on the go.

How to set up your Shopify store to sell salon services?

Enable appointment scheduling

Shopify allows you to customize your site with a host of applications for different features. As a salon business, it is imperative that you manage client appointments flawlessly for a successful customer experience. SidePanda's Appointo, available on the Shopify App market, is a feature rich appointment management application that can be seamlessly integrated with your website. The app not only integrates with the website but also your calendar applications, messaging service, mail server, etc. to manage appointments, notifications, rescheduling, analytics, and other activities.

Add your products and services on the site

The site allows you to add products for sale in the admin console under Products>All Products>Add Product. When adding services, ensure that you uncheck the box labeled "This is a physical product" under the "Shipping" section to make it an intangible product/service. 

Appointo also allows you to convert products to service in Shopify making it easier to integrate the salon's services with the respective professional's availability.

Set up payment options

Once you have your products and services added, the next step is to set up payment options. You can choose your preferred payment gateway and integrate the same with your Shopify website. Shopify's application store also provides a host of options to showcase different payment formats. For example, you can choose applications that allow subscription payments, installment options, and more allowing you to bundle or price services differently for customers and loyalty members. You can choose from a host of payment options at Shopify from Settings>Payments. 

For third party providers that are not listed in the "Payment providers" section, you can look for further options in the "Alternative payment methods" section. Most payment gateways would share the step-by-step process of integration with Shopify on their website.

Enable appointment customizations

While customers raise appointment requests on the website, the form has a limited number of fields and cannot help capture all the custom requests that a customer may have. Ensure that your appointment form has an open-ended custom request field to capture customer requests so you can assign and prepare for the appointment accordingly. Once an appointment comes through, the workflow automation will trigger a pre-set notification acknowledging and confirming the request. This email can be customized to include information regarding the stylist, products to be used, allergies to be aware of, pre and post appointment care details as well as a link to help modify the appointment details. This encourages customers to customize their appointments as per their preferences and ultimately helps improve customer satisfaction.

Set up automated workflows

While Shopify allows you to create custom workflows through Shopify Flow, Appointo's robust workflow automation allows you to manage appointment booking to execution from a single window. Appointo's workflow automation tool can be used to customize workflows as per the services offered. For example, for all your nail salon appointments, the workflow can be customized to ensure that appointments are booked only for a longer time duration followed up with the available nail art options being communicated to the client which is further communicated to the respective professional and a final notification, reminder, rescheduling option, and feedback email sent to the client at appropriate times.

Create compelling website content

Selling products online is far easier than selling services. A salon service in any given locality, runs mainly on word of mouth and customer testimonials. The happier the customers, the better the business. Although, word of mouth is difficult to achieve online. While the service needs to be delivered physically, communicating regarding the same virtually does not carry the same impact as an in person conversation. This makes it imperative that you put considerable thought behind the content that your website carries. For a salon service, ample customer testimonials, service delivery videos, before and after transformation images, etc. work better. Ensure that every service offering is described with utmost detail such as the time taken to deliver the service, products utilized for the same, and so on.

Shopify's impressive app store allows you to play with the website and customize it to your liking. Build a responsive website that attracts, engages, communicates, and interacts with the customer. Leverage the app store to build your logistics backend for the shop and SidePanda's Appointo, an appointment management application, to seamlessly manage appointments from the website and the point of sale in one place. Happy pampering!