Kaplya Laka beauty salon: website and booking via Telegram

Guests choose a salon by its specialists, prices and reviews, and they want to book without calling — including in the evening, when nobody answers the phone anymore. The salon needs bookings that don't get lost and guests who don't forget their visit.

To show such a site at work, we built a sample — a working site for Kaplya Laka, a made-up beauty salon in Kaliningrad. The salon doesn't exist, but the site is real: you can open it and book the way your customer would. Test bookings and requests from the sample come to us, the studio. The bot will send you a confirmation and reminders, just like a guest, and we will reply to a test request the way the salon's administrator would — you don't need to go anywhere. The sample site is in Russian.

The site covers six categories: manicure, pedicure, brows, lashes, haircuts and coloring, and makeup. The price list has 19 services. Each one shows how long it takes and its “from” price, that is, the lowest price. The specialist names the exact price before starting. Each of the five specialists has their own page: a portrait, specialty, years of experience, a short bio, their services with prices, three photos of their work and reviews about them. The site also has guest reviews and contacts: address, opening hours, how to find the entrance and a map. The salon adds reviews to the site itself; in the sample they are made up.

The salon edits services and prices, specialist bios and reviews itself — in the admin panel. It's a closed section of the site: you sign in with a login and password, and visitors don't see it. No developer is needed for this. The admin panel also shows booking requests — they come from the form on the site, from guests who book without Telegram (more on that below). The salon sends us the photos for the site, and we add the specialist portraits and work photos when the site launches.

The salon doesn't exist, so all 21 photos on the site — specialist portraits, their work and the salon interior — come from Unsplash. It's a stock photo site where photographers post their pictures. They can be used on a website for free, even if the website helps make money. For every photo we recorded who took it and on what terms it can be used (that's the license). The people in the portraits are not the salon's specialists, and the work in the photos is not theirs. On a client's site we do not pass off strangers as specialists: until there is a real photo, the portrait place shows a placeholder in the site's style. On a real salon's site, these places will have photos of its own specialists, their work and its interior.

The Book button is in the top bar of every page, and also on the home page, on each specialist's page and on the contacts page. The button opens the salon's bot in Telegram. A bot is an automated chat partner in the messenger: it writes to the guest by itself, without an administrator. In the bot, the guest taps Start and then the menu button (labeled “Открыть”, Russian for “Open”) — the Booking mini app opens, a small window right inside Telegram, nothing to download.

Then the guest takes four steps: picks a service, then a specialist who does it, then a free time slot within the next two weeks, and finally reviews the booking and confirms it. The bot sends the guest a confirmation right away and reminders before the visit: a day before and 2 hours before. That way the guest won't forget the booking. The bot reports every new booking in Telegram right away — to the salon owner or to a group chat with the administrators — with the guest's name from their Telegram profile.

Telegram booking has its own admin panel, separate from the site's. There the salon adds specialists and services and sets the days of the week and hours each specialist works: the app shows guests free time slots based on this schedule. The administrator also sees all bookings there. If the administrator moves or cancels a booking, the guest gets a message about it. Specialists and services are managed in the booking panel separately from the site: if you change them on the site, change them in the booking panel too.

Guests who don't use Telegram can book too. On the home page and at the bottom of every page, under the Book button, there is a “Leave a request” link: it leads to the Booking page with a short form — name, phone number or Telegram username, and a comment. This is a request, not a confirmed booking: the administrator calls or writes back and finds a time. The request goes to Telegram right away — to the owner or to a group chat with the administrators — and is saved in the site's admin panel.

A site like this is the “Site for your industry” plan: we take the sections and features from this sample and design the look for your salon. Telegram booking is a separate plan, “Industry app in Telegram”. It includes the Booking mini app, the bot and the booking admin panel, plus a bonus stamp card — you can see it in our Gushcha coffee shop sample. This salon sample has no bonuses, it shows only booking.