The business you run is doing great, but the money comes in through two “entrances” – you both sell products and accept bookings for the services you offer. Are you wondering whether you should handle these two areas with separate systems or implement one unified software to control everything? Do you need a custom-made system or can do fine with a SaaS? And what kind of system allows you to both sell your merchandise and enables customers to book your services?
Handling all through one system is a solution that can make things relatively easy for a business that operates this way.
What Systems Do Others Use?
To sell your products, you’re most probably using an e-commerce platform. Typically, SMBs don’t have the money to invest in the development of a custom-made solution, while SaaS solutions come with a ton of advantages that allow anyone to start selling goods right away.
As for bookings, businesses often go with appointment scheduling software. It is a system that lets you accept online bookings from clients. Using a SaaS booking system comes with many benefits, but we would highlight these three as essential:
Saving your time
With an online booking service, you won’t need to call people to schedule or send emails back and forth to settle on a time that works for both of you. They can easily see available sessions and book the time that works best for them. Also, you will avoid overbooking or making mistakes in your appointments.
Booking outside business hours
Clients can access your booking system whenever they want to schedule an appointment. That removes the need for booking over the phone and may reduce cancellations and later time changes as they can look at their schedule and book an appointment.
You become easier to reach
Even though clients spend less time contacting you this way, booking software allows people to access your services more efficiently. Some people may have harder times reaching out directly. Without the need for a phone conversation, your clients can reach you quickly and make last-minute appointments if their schedule clears up.
How to Both Sell and Enable Bookings?
Typical appointment scheduling software doesn’t include the feature for product selling because they are designed to offer services booking. So, if a business wants to use a single system, they usually use a plugin, an add-on, or a patchwork for their e-commerce website that enables their clients to book services and purchase their products. However, this comes with certain disadvantages. It is still not a centralized solution for taking care of both products and services, and it can lead to lost purchases, overlooked bookings, and other mistakes. Also, reservations are taken via a platform other then the one they’re using to sell products.
The Right Solution
As a startup or SMB owner, you know that a limited budget is an obstacle that prevents you from investing in the development of a single, custom-made platform through which you would take care of everything. Besides developing and deploying, you will still need to hire someone outside your company to maintain the system and upgrade it when required (which may come with a set of issues.)
DG1 offers a solution – a natural system which allows its users to sell products and provide service bookings from a centralized dashboard. This system integrates into the DG1 centralized platform, which removes the need for outsourced resources.
Click here to get started with DG1 and found out the benefits that our system can bring to your enterprise today.
Tags: sell products, booking, centralized, small business, custom-made
