Four in ten Highland hire and activity businesses I looked at can't take a booking online
Someone wants a bike for Saturday. They fill in your form, or send an email, and wait. Some of them wait.
The rest book somewhere that took their money on the spot.
I build websites that take the booking and the deposit for you. Fixed price, £1,200.
Have a click first, read after
Stag & Sprocket isn't a real shop. Everything on its site is real and working.
Pick some dates and watch the fleet filter down to what's actually free. Book a bike, pay a deposit with a test card, get the confirmation. Then log in as the owner and see the same booking land on the shop's side.
Then try to book a bike that's already out. That's the bit worth seeing.
Prices
| The website£1,200 once |
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|---|---|
| Keeping it running£49 a month |
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No commission. Not now, not later. What your customers pay, you keep, minus whatever Stripe takes for the card.
Not included, so you know up front: photography, if you want it shot properly. Your own Stripe account, which only you can open. Anything I'd have to invent, like a shop till system.
It's yours, including if you leave
Your domain stays on your own registrar, in your name, and the Stripe account is yours. If the domain is sitting with someone else right now, getting it back to you is the first thing we do. The code is yours and so is every booking in your database. Ask for either whenever you like and I'll send it over, no notice needed and no reason required.
The hosting, the code repository and the database sit on my accounts. That's on purpose, and it's what keeps this at £49 a month rather than £85: one set of hosting accounts covers everything I build, instead of you paying for your own.
Plenty of people have been burned here. You pay monthly for years, then want to move, and find the website can't be separated from the company that built it. That's not this. If you leave, I hand you the code and a full copy of your bookings, and you or any developer you like can put it wherever you want. Your domain never moved, so nothing breaks while you do it. I'll help with the move for a month after you've stopped paying me.
“Couldn't I just add a free booking widget?”
You could, and for some shops that's the right answer.
Two things worth knowing. The ones that are free to you are free because they add around six percent to your customer's bill at checkout, so you pay for it in the bookings that don't get finished. And a lot of them are built for tours rather than hire. A fleet with overlapping dates, damage deposits, ID at handover, the same bike in three sizes. That's the awkward part, and it's the part they do worst.
The other difference is that you'd be renting theirs. This one you own.
Cal Proctor
I build booking and operations systems. The last one was a hire portal that a real fleet runs on every day, handling requests and approvals between staff and customers.
The booking and deposits engine on this one is my own work, and Stag & Sprocket is it running end to end. Click it rather than take my word for it.
You'd be dealing with me start to finish. Same person on the phone in February as the one who built it in November.
From yes to live
A call, twenty minutes. I look at how bookings reach you now and tell you straight whether this is worth doing.
You send three things. Your bike list with prices, any photos you already have, and access to your domain. The domain is the one that catches people out, so we start it early.
I build it. Two weeks from the day your materials are with me.
You check it and we change things. Two rounds of changes are included.
It goes live and I show you how to run it. Then it's yours.
Winter is the sensible time to do it, so it's live before the season.
Get your website taking bookings before next season
If your website can't take a booking on a Saturday night, that's the whole pitch.
Fort William, Aviemore, Skye, Inverness and anywhere else I can reach in a morning.