Website for a tyre fitter, with slots that match the job
Four tyres and a balance is work you can time to the minute. A four wheel alignment is not, and neither is the kerbed rim, the locking nut with no key, or the driver who booked a swap and turns out to need a full set.
The site runs on your own domain, with SSL, hosting and nightly backups in every plan. From £49 to £199 a month, excluding VAT.
Three things the diary gets wrong
All three come from the same place: a bay holds a fixed amount of time, and a name written in a column has no idea how much of it the job will take.
Fifteen minutes, or an hour and a half
A swap on wheels already mounted is quick and predictable. An alignment is a car up, measurements taken, adjustments made and measurements taken again, and it does not fit into the gap you left for a swap.
When both are only a name in the same column, the alignment eats the two bookings behind it, and the two drivers behind it sit in the waiting area reading the posters on the wall.
The storage list is a spreadsheet
You have racks of wheels belonging to people whose names are on labels and in a file that one person in the unit maintains. Somewhere in there is who is due in, who has paid for another season, and who moved house two years ago and has not been seen since.
Every one of those is somebody who ought to be booking in, and not one of them can, because storage is not on the website at all.
The pull to the left that never gets booked
The driver knows something is wrong. They know the steering feels heavy, or that the inside edges are wearing, and they have no idea the thing they want is called a four wheel alignment or that you do it at all.
So they book a tyre, mention it once the car is up, and a job you could have priced and scheduled becomes a favour squeezed into fifteen minutes you did not have.
Four things worth setting up first
Chosen for a unit where the whole margin sits in whether the bay is full and the work actually fits.
The slot is as long as the work
Each service carries its own duration. A swap on a set already on rims takes what it takes, a fit and balance on four new tyres takes longer, and an alignment takes considerably longer than either of them.
The driver chooses the job first and only afterwards sees times, so what gets booked is a gap that will hold the car.
Bays, ramps and fitters as resources
Whether you can take a car at half ten is a question about equipment, not about how full a page looks. Put the bays in as resources, put the alignment rig in as one of its own, and tie each service to what it needs.
Then two cars can be swapped while the rig does one alignment, and nothing on the site is able to promise a fourth.
The driver moves their own slot
A tyre appointment is the easiest thing in the world to forget and the easiest to shift. The link in the booking lets somebody push Tuesday to Thursday without ringing a counter where the phone is permanently engaged.
When they do, Tuesday goes back onto the site straight away, and in a busy week it will be gone again within the hour.
A message before the day, not on it
The confirmation goes out at the moment of booking, with the time and what the car is coming in for. The reminder lands the day before, which is while a fifteen minute slot can still be rescued or handed to somebody else.
E-mail is part of every plan, and SMS, which is what most drivers actually read, is available as a prepaid add-on.
A tyre list, set out properly
Your names and your prices. What is worth taking from this is which pricing type each job gets.
Categories keep fitting, alignment and storage apart, each with a page and prices of its own.
Questions from behind the counter
That is rather the point of it. Every service has a duration of its own, so a swap and an alignment take different amounts of the diary and the second cannot be dropped into a gap left for the first.
It works as a service with a price per season, listed on the page like anything else, so the people whose wheels sit on your racks can book their next fitting and their next season without you chasing a spreadsheet.
The diary stops promising what the unit cannot do. Slots run out because the bays are full rather than because somebody wrote too many names down, and whoever cannot get Saturday is shown the Tuesday that is open.
That is what a service page is for. Describe the symptoms, the uneven wear and the heavy steering, then price the work, and drivers book it as a job instead of asking for a favour with the car already up.
Yes, it can be imported, and whatever text is worth keeping is kept. The rest is written from a short description of the workshop, and after that you change it by clicking the pencils on the page.
Between £49 and £199 plus VAT, depending on the plan. All four carry the site on your own domain, with SSL, hosting, nightly backups and support, and SMS is bought up front as an add-on.
More trades
- Car valeting and detailingPackages per car size, paid at booking.
- Driving schoolsBooking per instructor and car, packages up front.
- Garages and MOT centresBooking per ramp and mechanic, with reminders.
- Hair salonsBooking per chair and treatment length.
- BarbersA booking that takes ten seconds on a phone.
- Nail salonsThe three week refill books itself.
- All trades
Put the bays onto the website
Tell it what you fit, how many bays you run and roughly how long each job takes, or point at your current page. What comes back is a first version with the services, the storage and a diary that respects the bays, ready to edit.
The site runs on your own domain, with SSL, hosting and nightly backups in every plan. From £49 to £199 a month, excluding VAT.