Barbershop website with online booking and walk-in clients

Héctor runs a barbershop in Minatitlán with three chairs: his own, Saúl’s, and Joel’s. Two Saturdays ago a client texted him on WhatsApp asking for 12:00 with Saúl, Héctor wrote it down in the notebook by the register, and at 11:50 Saúl sat down the next walk-in from the bench. The guy with the appointment stood at the door for half an hour, then left, and Héctor started looking for a barbershop website with online booking.

What held him back was the doubt almost every barber has. On Saturdays, half his clients show up with no appointment and just sit and wait. If everyone else books online, what happens to the guys on the bench?

Both can coexist on the same Saturday, as long as the bench and the website write into the same calendar.

What is a barbershop website with online booking?

A barbershop website with online booking is your price list, your barbers, and your address, all in one link, with a button for the client to pick their cut, their barber, and the time. In Proyecta, the website and the calendar are the same thing: the appointment lands on your Schedule, under the barber the client chose.

The list Héctor used to have taped to the wall now lives on his website: classic cut, fade, beard trim, and cut-and-beard, each with its price. Since he collects payment at the shop, no one pays when booking. The client reserves with their name and WhatsApp number, and under the Next button the page tells them: “Book without creating an account.” Nobody asks the regular who just wants his usual cut for a password.

Can you take online appointments if almost everyone walks in?

Yes, as long as walk-ins also get logged into the calendar. When a barber sits down the next person from the bench, Héctor opens New appointment on his phone, picks which barber, enters the name and the service, and logs it. From that moment on, the website no longer offers that slot with that barber.

A name is enough to log it. If you don’t ask for a phone number, the calendar warns you: “With no phone or email, this booking won’t be saved to your Clients list and they won’t get any notice.” For someone just passing through, that’s fine. For a regular who comes in every two weeks, ask for their WhatsApp, and next time they’re already on your list.

Don’t skip the service: with it, the appointment blocks out exactly how long that job takes, 45 minutes for a fade. And the 12:00 slot that got requested over WhatsApp, logged the same way, would have shown up under Saúl’s column instead of the register notebook.

How do you keep the appointment and the walk-in from colliding?

With Minimum notice, found under Schedule, in Settings. There you choose how much advance notice your clients need to book on your website: No minimum, or 1, 2, 3, 4, 6, 12, 24, or 48 hours. Slots starting before that window stop being offered to anyone online, while the appointments you log yourself aren’t bound by that limit.

In a barbershop, that spreads the day out. Héctor set his to 2 hours: on a Saturday at 10:00, the site offers noon onward, leaving 10:30 and 11:00 for the people already seated. The client sees it right under the time slots: “Bookings need at least 2 hours’ notice.”

Bookings made days ahead still go through: someone booking on Thursday for Saturday at 10:30 gets it, because the minimum notice only guards the next few hours. And it’s a single number for the whole week, so it applies on Tuesdays too. That didn’t worry Héctor, since anyone wanting a cut in the next half hour doesn’t need an appointment: they just walk in and sit down.

What happens to the leftover minutes after a cut-and-beard?

They don’t go to waste: when an appointment ends between two time slots, the site also offers that exact end time as a slot. On Héctor’s calendar, slots run on the half hour, so if Saúl has a cut-and-beard from 4:00 to 4:45, the site offers another client 4:45, without waiting until 5:00.

The same happens after the appointments Héctor logs himself. Without this, six cut-and-beard appointments in one afternoon would leave an hour and a half of empty chair time, scattered in fifteen-minute scraps.

Does the website track the walk-in line?

No. Proyecta doesn’t manage the line of people waiting without an appointment: whoever arrived first goes first, as always, and that’s on Héctor and his barbers to handle. What the calendar does do is avoid offering a slot online once you’ve logged someone from the bench into it.

What Héctor did add was a rule on his website, right above the services, for both kinds of clients: “We also take walk-ins: come in and wait your turn. Appointments have a 10-minute grace period; if you arrive later, the next person on the bench goes ahead and we’ll fit you into the next open slot.” He asked Proyecta for that in the chat, in those exact words.

That first Saturday, the website brought him eleven bookings. Seven were booked during the week and four that same Saturday, none less than two hours out. One client showed up at 2:14 for his 2:00 appointment, the next person on the bench went ahead, and he got seated at 2:30 without complaint, because he’d already read the rule.

How do I set this up for my barbershop?

Describe your business to Proyecta in your own words. Something like: “a website for my barbershop in Minatitlán with three barbers, Héctor, Saúl, and Joel, each with their own calendar; classic cut $160 (30 min), fade $200 (45 min), beard trim $110 (20 min), and cut-and-beard $240 (45 min); online booking with each barber, payment at the shop, and we also take walk-ins; address, photos of cuts, and a WhatsApp button”.

Before sharing the link, set your Minimum notice. To figure out how much, count how many people are sitting on the bench this Saturday at every hour on the hour. Multiply the highest number by half an hour and divide it by your number of chairs. Héctor got eight at 11:00: four hours of work split across three barbers, a little over an hour to clear the bench, and he rounded up to 2. Get started at proyecta.dev.