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Please review: DoReserve.com, an appointment booking system

5 points by killerstorm ↗ HN
We have just created/launched this site.

The idea is that small/medium businesses can outsource online booking system to this service. We have noticed that a lot of small companies such as beauty salons and restaurants have very rudimentary web sites which do not have booking facilities at all, but they could benefit from booking via web a lot.

So the site was recently launched, but there is a problem -- users show surprisingly low interest in this service. So we wonder -- is it a problem with site? with the idea itself? or maybe it just needs to be advertised/promoted in other way?

Here's a demo:

http://doreserve.com/about/demo

Any feedback/discussion is welcome.

Please note that English version of the site lags a bit to versions in other languages, so please don't be too mean about bad language or a lack of some content.

7 comments

[ 4.0 ms ] story [ 34.7 ms ] thread
megamark16
This looks awesome! I thought about doing something like this and approaching individual salons in the area to start getting some traction but I never actually started building anything. If I had, I imagined it being pretty much exactly what you've got there, so good on ya! I personally like the layout, I was easily able to find my way around the admin, and I recognize a few jQuery libraries in there that I've worked with before.

With that being said, I'd move the Notes textbox to the confirmation page, I think having it on the event selection page just floating there in the middle is kind of confusing.

I like it, and I wish you luck. As for traction, you might spend some time looking around at websites for different salons and see who their web developers are, than approach those developers directly. My daughter's ballet teacher's website was created by a web dev shop that specializes in dance websites, I'm sure there are shops out there that have a large client base of salons and such, so once you sell it to them they can sell it to their clients who already trust them.

evlapix
People with smaller/medium businesses don't typically put a lot of emphasis on websites (based on my measure/references). Users of these services probably acknowledge that fact and have grown accustomed to scheduling appointments by phone.

On the other hand, small/medium businesses that do put a large emphasis on their website, and do have a client base that regularly utilizes their online presence, might have anxiety about passing their clients along to another site to place appointments. They may or may not have their own online solution for this. But regarless, I'd bet they want to own that function themselves. Do you offer your service as module/plugin that they may insert into their site easily?

Another thing I'd suggest is being more clear on your home page about what you actually do (as a software). The testimonial on the home page is great, but not the best place for it.

killerstorm
> People with smaller/medium businesses don't typically put a lot of emphasis on websites.

Indeed they don't, but perhaps they could consider a web site as a source of additional customers, or as a way to offload phone scheduling, or maybe they just want to organize their booking system better (they can use admin part of the site for it) and booking via web is just a bonus. Of course that won't necessarily fit into everyone's working process, but I hope at least some might look to adopt it.

> Do you offer your service as module/plugin that they may insert into their site easily?

Well, yeah. There is a way to embed it on site via iframe, and also we're working on integration modules for some CMSs. For a larger customers we can make custom integration, whatever they want, basically, as long as they pay for it :).

iceter
Looks excellent to me ! I am sure there will be many happy clients using this one.