Mastering Online Booking with Check Cherry

0:01 h hey Matt hey Jud okay let's see here we got a couple more minutes before six but we'll start on time as usual and I think they got this going to the YouTube yeah that up I can see the comments if anybody hey M hey Jud oh that okay like wait a minute

1:48 hello everyone hey hey oh fipa is sharing the video she's here that's fun ni you got your Laker gear on funny that was fun love it you guys are in um LA right ler fans Matt's actually Matt Matt played quite a bit of basketball these days younger right there's no Sports going on in our life These Days kids go to the gym that's about it then I'm doing

2:32 that's when I'm doing well although Matt and I did play a game of do we what we play a pig or horse in the pool and I won by slam dunking or I was like jumping over the hoop you know but little more agile cheating so well at six o'clock let's get started so um this is the next webinar in our Series so again every two weeks we plan to do a webinar um we have had a little bit of a break

2:58 over the summer and we're back at it um and this one's on the online booking engine basically so we wanted to talk about online booking go through it um show some settings um talk about some best practices some things we see people do that are good and not so good that we think um they can improve all that stuff obviously you guys can uh chat with questions at any time um and we'll get

3:21 into it and and answer um but the idea is just to go through the booking in in depth um and just kind of just see what it's all about and I guess to start with chech cherry basically started with online booking um and pretty much we didn't have much more than online booking right when we showed up at the first uh with Expo um and so it's been a core design constraint from day one basically and

3:47 so what's cool about it is like everything kind of works with online booking um and ties into it so you don't have to offer online booking with Check Cherry we do have customers that don't but a lot of people do and I think that um it's great to I think a lot of times the the business owners are like hey I want bookings when I don't have to talk to somebody and like that's the the

4:07 benefit of online booking um and I think that that's true but I also think that clients really like the convenience of online booking and that's the real appeal and that the way we've set it up basically you can cor collect leads and it's kind of a sales funnel and so it's a great way to also collect leads so I think making your clients happy collecting lead leads and then I guess for me it's

4:29 like the bonus is the online bookings when they basically sign without much work U but I think most you know we should run the numbers again um I think most bookings do require somebody to touch them right the majority I think 60% or something like that so depends uh obviously on your business how you set things up and all that stuff so um Matt why don't you maybe want to share your screen

4:52 and we'll kind of talk about so uh when we say online booking we're not talking about accepting proposals online um the online booking engine at check Cherry is basically a multi-step process and so um the first step basically the way we've had it set up in the package manager services and then and then if there's uh multiple Services you choose between those and then you go into the

5:16 package groups um and so this is I guess in our minds a lot of this is about helping the prospect find what's right for them right like I show up to website maybe I click a call to action uh on your marketing website pricing view packages like help me understand you know what's a good package for me like kind of I think that that's really um something that's helpful um and we have

5:39 a lot of different settings in here um to based on your you know preferences and so on um but as you go through you'll see um also you'll see you know Matt's going through you can see basically the pricing right there we don't you know this the standard booking engine does doesn't ask for personal information until after they see pricing and so that's intentional the idea

6:04 behind that is if somebody sees your pricing and still gives personal information they're going to become a lead in check Cherry and that's a good lead it's like a real high quality solid lead as opposed to give me your email address and I'll email you pricing right those probably not so good leads um another thing I want to say is like pricing is it's a marketing tool so we do have

6:27 a setting where you can hide pricing on the pack that package sctor page and that came from people who were U what I would say is kind of a little more insecure about hey I want to be able to make sure I get the lead basically before I scare him off with pricing and fair enough we do have that but it takes away something really important from that page which is you can use pricing to Anchor

6:48 and like establish value like on a lower end and then like have a higher package make the middle package you know more affordable you can do things like um I guess really like just use price as an indication as to what they're getting you know and also what kind of business you are right are you higher end lower end mid uh price range all that stuff so um yeah let's look at the settings

7:13 though so like there's the kind the the steps but if you'll see here go ahead Matt maybe the package manager you can maybe you can talk yeah so if you're on your uh dashboard and you go to manage packages this is where most of these settings are coming from um is under manage packages and so if you're logged in you can see that or you know um and um you know you notice that kind of at the

7:35 highest level we've got what we call services so we've got in this setup we've got a DJ service a photo booth service a photography service um you know that's going to correspond to kind of the first first step of your booking um you know and there's different settings you can you can adjust there and we'll take a look at some of those um um kind of the Second Step you know if I click on DJ

7:59 I'm going to see what what's in there so in this case we've got wedding incorporate and so that's going to correspond to these these groups within within the DJ service um you know and those are going to have some settings and then within each of those groups you can have additional packages and kind of if you know our Our advice our you know best practice would be ideally you're you're

8:25 you know probably presenting your customer with maybe three to five choices at any one time um because if you've got a 100 packages on one page it just gets really hard as a customer to kind of figure out like what am I where should I be what am I what am I looking for um you know not a hard and fast rule but um just kind of a best practice so um you know depending on on you know your your

8:49 business you might not have different service types but you might have different locations and so you might want your first step to be different cities you work in you know if you've got a New York branch and a Florida Branch or something like that you know maybe you would have that or um you know different services or different things like that so um so yeah so if we look at some

9:13 of the the specific settings in here um a lot of the settings are going to be within the package itself so each package of course is going to have you know a title and a descript deson um and then lots of lots of pricing and scheduling options um maybe we'll get into the the the scheduling a little bit later um and we've also got some stuff under Advance too that can be helpful so uh

9:41 the main one that's going to show up early is is you know this show title on the booking page you know sometimes people will have like nice um nice little Graphics where you know it says silver gold and platinum here maybe it's a little redundant to say that in text up above so you can hide that title if you want to or conversely you can add more stuff you know um you want to say something

10:06 like most popular um or best value or things like that um then that's going to show up kind of in in subtext under there so can be a nice way to kind of you know denote things that that uh that are useful and then um yeah any any anything else you want to add on the that no but I mean I do want to say like about having a lot of packages like there's a something called the Paradox of

10:33 choice and I'm kind of I was looking it up but it's like there's a book you know written by a psychologist back in 2005ish and basically when you present somebody with too many options like they're they're less likely to make a decision it's kind of counterintuitive you're like no no no I've got all these options you just tell me which one you want you know and humans tend to be less

10:51 likely to make decisions and um it's harder to make decisions when there's too many options and so I think just leaning into that you know I what I would say is kind of like the 8020 rule like you know 80% of your business probably comes from 20% of your offerings type situation like just lean into those and handle exceptions and what other people want kind of outside your normal sales

11:14 process does that make sense like you can always you can you can still do it um but I just wouldn't kind of lead with it I wouldn't start with it in general try to keep it straightforward um you know and then one or the other you mentioned earlier um kind of the notion of hiding your pricing at least until you collect information um obviously we can't we can't allow online booking without

11:36 showing the customer pricing at some point um you know a feature request that that was somewhat common that we got though was that people didn't want to show this until they had collected a name and email um we do have a setting for that so you'll find that kind of at the at the group level um and we set it there so that you know everything on this this page has the same value but if I were

11:58 to go to wedding um and hide my pricing or delay my pricing then instead of showing the pricing there if I'm on the right page here um yeah then we're going to hide that pricing until um until they provide the contact details you know that that reminds me of just like the co concept that there's like there's no Solutions there's only tradeoffs you know so what are the trade-offs here

12:22 so it's like yes you're going to get leads and not scare people off with price but but you're also going to get people that don't have the price become lead don't know the price you know price fishes become leads and also I think really important you can't use price as like a marketing tool on this stage like that's a really important component when you're comparing packages and you

12:40 don't see that here you know how would I know make it really hard as a customer if I'm not familiar kind of the ins and outs like you know when I see wedding Platinum is this like $200 more or like 2,000 that's I'm saying so it gets really hard to to kind of yeah so it's definitely a tradeoff but some people prefer that tradeoff we do it and then um and so let's go ahead and pick one

13:03 of these we'll pick this gold package and we'll notice the next you know at this point we're going to start collecting information um name last name phone number uh kind of a quir of of check Cher the the way we do it um when you're logged in as an admin we're not going to collect the email address and the reason for that is um there's a little tip here about that but the reason for

13:34 that is uh we don't want to Auto you know if you have like automated emails that go out to people that don't finish the process you know if you're if you're kind of walking somebody through it or if you know you're doing it on the phone for them we don't want to be kicking out emails that hey you didn't you know you didn't finish your booking process so um so to see it 100% exactly as the

13:52 customer is going to you'll either want to open up a private window or log out Matt Philipa had a question here which is service and are different for booking and so phipa I'm not sure what you mean um kind we say service and brands are different for booking U maybe you want to chime in and let us know um yeah so when you have different brands because I see when he posted

14:19 Services he had DJ photo booth photography um and the main page oh yeah so is that different than Brands yes so Brands so if we go over to um to our business setting so if if you do have multiple Brands which would typically be you know different business names you know maybe under your you know you've got a completely different photography company you know different DBA different website

14:51 all that type of stuff you might decide to create a separate brand for them um you know you know if you do business all under the same business name I wouldn't wouldn't recommend you know creating Brands otherwise but for each brand you can go in and say which um which packages and services you want to make available so you know we've got this kind of set up as a photography brand and so

15:13 um so we might just want to check our photography packages and so now if I go to um Bean shot's uh start page reservation page I'm only going to see those photography packages I'm not going to see everything and so you can have your services show up under all of your Brands under one of your brand um however you want but basically that's going to be um something that you said at the at

15:44 the Brand level um with that with that selector and so how many Brands can we have with our profile so it depends on your plan I think it's 24 and six I want to say so two for everybody um and then you can get up to four with the middle plan and then I think six plus with the other one yeah and it's um like I said I would say most of our customers don't use multiple Brands you just

16:10 a single brand but if you do have a different you know different business you do under that can be helpful um and so couple things I wanted to point out you know as you go through this booking process um you know along the along each step we're going to be saving all this information for you so the customer you know once they put in their email and name and all that um we're going

16:35 to save all that information as a lead and you can have emails go out to the customer you could even send yourself an email and then you could give them a call um you know just kind of little things to kind of uh touch base with customers that don't end up finishing it um if they do finish it we'll automatically um we won't send out emails so it's um a real easy way to kind of pick up some leads

16:57 and I think within a default account we do have um just kind of a basic touch base email go out maybe 10 or 15 minutes after just saying hey you know do you have any questions let us know um you'll also see at the top this edit booking theme uh that's to me the easiest way to kind of set things like the background color so if you know if you don't like this uh we got a blue and yellow thing going

17:20 so horrible the blue yellow you want to change that to something else uh you know you could do an image somebody changed me quick we'll just go with pure blue here um let's see then we'll refresh and now oh that's too blue so right do something a little less it's funny garish um okay A little better could still use some work but um but that be helpful for just kind of making it match your

17:54 um your website and typically since people are going to be clicking over here from your website you know when you're trying to come up with kind of your colors and and images and things like that um that's kind of what what you're going to want to use as your model you know if if you just kind of match your website's background color or you know if you've got a black website maybe a black

18:15 background looks right I was say if follow us fails white background yeah say white background is safe black background if you've got a black website looks nice gray or something you know something yeah and there's not a ton of settings under there you know you can change the text color so obviously if you've got a black background you want to switch that to White um and then you can

18:34 kind of tweak those those header texts and things like that so um that's purely just kind of some visual things next step you'll come to is the date date time and and hour selector so this um you know this is going to as they choose different amounts of time it's going to automatically uh recalculate that and so right now we're looking at the wedding gold package so I'm going to hop

18:59 over to our package manager and look at some of these settings so um so if I click on this wedding gold package and go to the pricing and scheduling we've got a few different like scheduling modes here um the default is on a photo booth account is or a a DJ I would say event service providers anyway is kind of minimal yeah yeah for most things it's probably going to be minimal and

19:27 what that's going to look like is this where the customer can put any date any time and you know if you allow extra hours any number of hours and that's real easy for the customer you know they can just kind of drop it in um the reason you might choose something else though is if you have a kind of a tighter schedule where you're trying to fit in multiple things per day so say

19:49 you're you've got a photography studio and you you can take you know one one group at a time um and you need to make sure that that they're booking you know only available times then as a customer it's a little bit annoying if I just and it says no I'm not available um then it might be helpful so let's let's change that over to automatic just to kind of see what thats and I think also the the

20:12 the difference in this mode too is that does the customer have flexibility on when they can have the services provided right because if I have a wedding I'm not changing my wedding date based on the availability of a service provider so I'm just going to give you the date and move on whereas I want family portraits maybe I can do Tuesday maybe I can do next week maybe I can you know there's a

20:31 little more flexibility and if you're booking out six months in advance the calendar picker is like way more steps you know it's just yeah and so and with that with the automatic slots um you know you can control like right now I've got it set to um you know when it when it shows the the times you know it's every half hour which just kind of leaves a lot of a lot of options so I might want

20:55 to reduce the number of um change that to one hour and then it's going to show I think people like this because it's kind of prettier you know that's why I think I see people like new signups will change this on because it's prettier but I just don't it you know it's um it's not as quick and effective on the client side for the customer you can limit the the start time and end time so

21:18 it doesn't you know start at 12 more settings more yeah um and then the the least by far the least commonly used um is this predefined slots and let's go ahead and set that and frankly we should we should prevent this from being possible but one one thing that we see happen sometimes is people will choose the the predefined slot option and then not Define any slots and so what's going

21:43 to happen there is um it's going to show that hey you don't have any slots available um and so sorry we're not able to take that booking so where the predefined slot option can be useful is if say um say you only do like a morning and an afternoon booking um you know anything 12 to 5:00 P PM is is your your afternoon spot and 8: am to noon or something is your morning spot um you might want

22:12 to come in and you know set your start end time and call it morning and set a start and end time and call it afternoon and we've seen like venues who charge different pricing Bas like Friday night Saturday night type you know venue space and then like hey if you want to do like a business meeting Monday Tuesday Wednesday Thursday Friday mornings like no big deal like that slots available at a

22:33 different rate but my Friday and Saturday nights are like a lot more expensive because I have that for other people or for weddings and other more important parties it demands higher frankly yeah but I would say venue you might want this photography particularly real estate photography but outside of that you probably don't want to use that option I would say 90% of our customers

22:55 should and you know n you know almost almost all the others should use automatic um so and then if you scroll down a little bit more we'll s that back to minimal you'll see um or I guess you know and then we've also got the the date only option so um so with the date option instead of them if we turn that on then instead of choosing a date and time all it's going to do

23:23 is let me choose a date and so that can be useful if like say you do um multi-day rentals like uh maybe you have a a booth that you rent out for like a week at a time and you want them to choose a a number of days um that's something you can do like you know a classic car that gets rented out for wedding something like that be G exactly so you could say hey I've got a, we and

23:45 I charge you know 500 for for each additional day up to you know whatever 10 days 100 days and instead of choosing a number of hours they'll choose how many um days they want whether it's available and um again it's not super common but um but it is there right and so we go down to the pricing um section A little bit so starting rate pretty self-explanatory um you know if if

24:17 you charge a flat rate for your booths that's pretty much all you need to do say Hey you know I charge a thousand bucks and and that's that um but real real common we see people that that set an hourly rate and so they say okay start at five hours and you know maybe a maximum of of something and have a um have an hourly rate for those those extra hours um kind of the next

24:40 one that comes up is this booking increment and that basically just decides like do you want to allow people to book five and a half hours six hours things like that or do you kind of want to limit it to um one thing I see with uh people that are kind of new to the business sometimes they'll have packages and the only difference is hours it's like three four five hours that's

25:00 my three packages and I guess that kind of when you're getting started like it's probably fine you know just keep on chugging along but you know you probably want to get out of that where just hours is not hours alone is not a difference in package that makes sense least not in check Cherry's World um You probably have a better opportunity to include add-ons and or other things in packages

25:20 that can establish value other than just hours that might be part of it but it's unlikely and then um and then we get to charge by unit so this is I'm already confused right so this is I would say another one of the less less commonly used options um where this can be useful is if say you um again like say you're like a venue and you charge um by guest count you know 30 bucks ahead

25:51 or say mobile bar a lot of times um they'll charge a yeah per per guest rate um that's where you can do that you can say you know I charge per guest um Real Estate photographers might do per square foot uh notaries might do per signature things like that and so um much less common that you know with with kind of our our typical customers but um but it can be useful and then unit range is um is

26:20 again it's kind of it's like maybe if you want to book for or you know maybe you're a real estate photographer and for 1,000 to 2,000 square feet you do one price and right yeah so again it's not super common but um but if you do need it it's it comes in hand you for sure and then deposit it's pretty self-explanatory you know do you require a deposit and if so is it a flat

26:46 rate or a percentage um probably worth mentioning you know if I do 50% that's going to be 50% of the full of the total balance not just package so if they do choose some add-ons and you know you have some travel fees and things like that um that 50% is going to be of the total so just had a couple of comments on on you know deposit rates and stuff like that is um obviously back

27:10 to the tradeoffs so if you charge a 50% deposit like you're going to have somebody who's pretty serious right and wants to book and and you know probably less likely to cancel whereas if you're charging a $50 deposit you know maybe you'll get morec cancellations even if they have to forego the 50 bucks um but the lower deposits in general are going to get more people to book um but at

27:33 the risk that there's not much they could lose you know on in a in a deposit um but I think you know I I guess I'm just sales focused I would like do more reasonable deposits as opposed to higher um that being said there are some Services where they have to basically shell out money you know to buy stuff for the booking and so I think in those cases it does makes sense to charge more for the

27:57 deposit and worth mentioning too um you know we do capture all that information as they're going through the booking process so if you see a bunch of leads coming through with everything except the payment um you know might be considering worth considering you know R too high like why did why is everybody getting all the way to the payment page and then and then getting scared so

28:18 and then kind of the final value or section on this page is the availability so uh you know most most of the time it's probably going to be easier to just leave this Cs and maybe set your your time off for availability business-wide but if you do have certain packages that are that are limited to you know certain days and times that can be useful y so um anything on dates and times before we go

28:41 to the next step no I would just again just resist the urge to use that calendar picker I know that that one if you're an event service provider I know it's not as attractive but I'm just so much quicker and easier that's the customer move on you know give me the date give me the time move on it's easier add-ons so add-ons correspond to what you have under manage add-ons um and again

29:10 you know on on each step you can kind of tweak colors and the the headings and things like that but um but the add-ons you know most of these are coming from um from your manage ad and I suppose like to take a step back right so people use on to upsell and just for the you know people who are newish um they're great upsell opportunities basically so they're optional things you can

29:35 add most of the time um they're extra money um although we have seen people that have add-ons that don't cost anything um but I think most of the time they're extra money and it's a great opportunity to like upsell um and I suppose we'll cover it later but you can also include add-ons automatically with other packages and all that stuff but um upsells are popular I guess with

29:56 with add-ons so yeah yeah and I think in terms of add-ons I would say there's a few few things that that you know few ways you can do it you know that can be um extra equipment you know something that physical that you're bringing out um that can be you know an experience you know uh you know something that just kind of makes it a little bit more premium um but it can also be things like

30:19 time so if you charge um for idle time um you know you can create an idle add-on and um you know you can say okay we charge $75 and um and then we've got some uh some Advanced more advanced settings to uh um let you do things like extend the the length of the booking in the system which is just helpful for kind of managing availability um but you might charge you know for extra time

30:47 or um uh see there's a couple other things I mention um extra attendance uh sometimes people will have like you know extra Booth attendance and it can be helpful to say um you know with that that instead of of charging a flat rate you know I can't charge $75 for an extra attendant because I don't know how many hours they're going to be booked um we have this price per hour feature

31:15 where you can say Okay I want to charge you know $75 an hour for that extra attendant or if you do have daily pricing you can even do it per day so um but I would say almost always you want to set the pricing to just flat rate unless you're doing something like a like an attendant where where it's going to get multiplied by the by the time and then talk about yeah go yeah and then

31:37 I was gonna say you can talk you can also set we've got this Max quantity for booking so that's going to default to one and you notice a lot of these are just saying um you know add for $50 but you can also say Okay I want to choose you know five hours and let them choose a quantity um and so that Max quantity is going to control whether that's possible or not so if I bump that

31:59 up to 10 then that becomes um um it'll it'll ask them for a quantity yeah and then do the pack the packages because I I think this is worth yeah and so then the other thing that's real real common is that you want to limit your add-ons to certain packages so um you know I'm not going to show Extra photo booth attendant to you know to a service that doesn't require that you know to

32:22 my photography clients or something so um so with the the package selector on the right um it's real real common that you want to limit that to you know only certain types of packages or you know even just one package what you're saying is that this this add-on is an upsell for these checked packages basically exactly and what else I got a couple questions

32:44 here so we said how do you set up a package to include an add-on so I don't know when when that now or later yeah let's do that okay so under manage packages and we might rework this a little bit the I think the UI this can be a little little improved but under the advanced settings so under manage packages choose a package and then go to advance um toward the

33:13 bottom you'll see a couple of additional options here so uh we've got this backdrops option and that just controls you know do you require the user to choose a backdrop um you know typically that's only going to to the photo booth world and you change that to yes or no make it optional or or or not and then um the new feature that we launched not long ago is is to allow a pack

33:36 package to include certain add-ons and so um that's going to be here and so if I click include add-on um I can select for my add-ons um let see we've got this we'll say this additional person we'll say whatever five um um and then I can click save and so now it's going to show in this add-on section everything I've added to the um to this package and so a couple of settings here um do you

34:06 want this add-on to be removed or should this be editable by the customer um if you check set that to yes they'll be able to uh take that back out um that can be uh helpful so we see some people like want to kind of sell pretty aggressively you know add a bunch of stuff and then you know then the customer can take it out if they want um less popular I would say but but it is something

34:31 that can be helpful um and then the other one is like do you want to include this at no charge so um you know maybe the reason that you're adding these add-ons to your packages is is more for availability reasons like um you know maybe you've got a certain photo booth and it can be sold as an add-on or a package and you just want to have one place where you can set your availability um

34:52 I've got more questions when you're done yep and I think that's it okay um and and just remember you can chat with us anytime you have questions just open up a chat when one other thing I was going to mention on that is so once once a um once somebody chooses a package you know if I choose this wedding silver package it adds a bunch of stuff to my to my cart uh maybe I can't edit

35:18 it I'll still be able to as the customer choose additional of those items so um you know as long as you've got the availability um I can choose an additional you know whatever loud speaker said in this example or um you know additional hours of of set of time and things like that if if needed so um so it's not you're not limited to just what what gets automatically added they can

35:41 add additional as well so hey Matt for that does it show on the proposal or it shows just during the booking process yeah what we'll do is when um what did I add this to wedding silver um um so if I create a proposal with the wedding silver um it'll work the same where we'll automatically add add those add-ons to the proposal and then um yeah and then based on your settings they

36:06 they may or may not be able to remove those and then with the online booking um same thing once they choose that wedding silver it'll show up in their cart and then you know they can add it or or edit it if if you allow them to so Paul says thoughts on photo booth websites including information and an image of what a specific app on is so by the time they get to the checkout they

36:27 are informed and so I don't follow that follow that 100% Paul but if you mean like your marketing website showing add-ons before they actually book um you know I like I prescribe to the thought process that kind of like less is more and if you just make it easy on like tell people what the next step is and if you overwhelm them with too many too much information you're going to get less

36:53 bookings overall that being said if you hear from customers hey like like all these leads wanted to see our add-ons before they're ready to book like well absolutely you need to put that on your website and listen to the customers but I don't think most people start that way um and I think it also gets a little bit complicated because if you're putting on your marketing website because

37:15 specifically not every add-on is available for every package and maybe some are included with some packages for some price and all that stuff and Check Cherry's multi-step booking process kind of just in inherently takes care of a lot of that so if that isn't your question you can maybe rephrase it um and then Abe says with all you've both seen at chech Cherry say from a photo booth

37:35 rental what are your best practice to increase conversions on Check Cherry that can function across the services within Beyond photo booth like best practices in general and so I suppose is that mean uh I offer I sell photo booth and now I want to sell something uh another type of service with it do you is that how you understand that Matt increased convers I think you might

37:56 just be looking for best practices in general and um yeah I I would say um you know early on we kind of mentioned avoiding too many choices all at once you know avoid the user getting overwhelmed um imagery matters a lot um you know the great thing about about this uh industry is you know you you're it's fun you know there's there's great imagery you can use so you know find images of of

38:22 events you've done or you know show people having fun really is is a lot of it um you know you might want to show the equipment if it's something if that's important to what they're um you know what they're helping them to differentiate um but otherwise I think showing um you know showing people having fun or showing the experience like what the what the booth is going to look like

38:44 when it's set up or things like that our demo account does not have the best images we probably should love you know at some point but um um and then make yeah I would say the descriptions um again these aren't the best examples but like like make it clear what's different between packages so um you know if I've got three different packages like make it real easy to

39:05 see at a glance what the what the differences are so that might be things like um you know maybe highlight some things in bold if if uh you know if you want to kind of call them out you know maybe if that's the thing that's different call you know highlight it in b or um you know um but that that description is a great great chance to sell as well DJ Dave Shannon's ranting about taking

39:27 50% deposit and and and basically you know even though you get 50% even though your contract says it's refund not refundable people are still going to ask for it and all that stuff and I would just um I don't know I mean I think that um it's one of the things that I is tough in business is like you can like your contract is there protect you I would say overall and I think it's

39:57 fair that you get a deposit to get a commitment out of people but I don't you're really swimming Upstream if somebody cancels six months out or something and you're trying to hold a deposit um because you might be able to fill the date and you know maybe it's not going to maybe you're it's just a battle probably maybe not worth fighting too much and maybe it would be a

40:15 case for a lower deposit amount because then it's not really much skin off your back to refund them um that being said like I get it um yeah I think it depends on your your customer type and and you know event types and and um you know what's interesting about the booking process we don't show what the deposit amount is going to be and kind of until they get to the end so um you know

40:37 try it out like see what happens you know if you get a bunch of leads you know if you bump your deposit up and and all of a sudden uh people stop converting um you'll probably see it and uh vice versa you know and I speaking of deposits and stuff there is also however there's hubub about the wording of deposit when it comes to holding deposits and non-refundable deposits and

41:00 this came up early on in chech Cherry's life and so we do have a setting where you can specify the terminology is it a deposit is it a retainer is it a booking fee is that is that the three options we offer yeah uh yeah under under the payment settings payment settings and always just chat with us if you can't find some of these uh more Fe settings but um but you can say um you know

41:27 what do you call a the initial payment you know deposit payment booking fee retainer um I think we default to deposit but some people say for legal reason law thing and the whole I don't even anyway a also says can you through automations uh basically give communication updates concern brides and wedding planners to assure them of the logistics fulfillment of deliver dely of

41:55 the rental and stuff and so uh the short answer is absolutely you can send out emails and text messages automatically through check Cherry I don't think it's within the scope of this webinar um chat with us we can kind of show you around um there's also a uh video on automated messages but certainly you can go through and create automated messages based on the schedule date the the when

42:18 it was booked all that good stuff yeah so here's another one how many of you are actually listening listing unlimited instant print print outs I've seen comments in other groups where clients are asking for more copies after the event because the prints are unlimited and so um I think you know obviously like I don't this to me I don't I so I have to I have to disclose I've never run a photo

42:44 boo company but to me this is one of those things where your your term should probably and I'm not an attorney but like your term should probably have like a fair use or what we mean by unlimited type stuff right like there's got to be a way around like I can't I'm not going to literally print Prince for the rest of my life for whatever it is I mean it's just obnoxious and ridiculous

43:04 the idea is that you don't have to worry about Prince I have seen people mention you know Prince for everybody in the booth type thing you know so if there's six people in the booth everybody gets a print um but I think this is more an area for your terms to deal with somebody who's kind of being um what I would say is unreasonable and abusive of and it's not like a marketing you know

43:26 I think most reasonable people would see it's not I'm not trying to be misleading with my marketing you know type stuff um and you might just you know in your terms like hey we don't send it after the event it's when it's there but like I'm not going to print 500 copies of something for you right now at the event ever like that's so ridiculous why are we here who are you send me a letter

43:49 you're somewhat limited to time but yeah I mean if like have your attorney send me a letter you know it's like well our five hours are over like you know I'm sorry won't be ridiculous but yeah I mean I'm sure you know and I think just you know term this is what your again terms in my opinion are for covering your ass primarily for protecting your business yeah yeah for um okay so I kind

44:10 of answering ab's question as far as like um my communication with the event planners at for setup time so I have so my initial question is is there way to lock in the title of the event because what I see happening is they book it and then I add I created so to answer A's question I created a package for setup time and so when I add the setup time obviously it's earlier than

44:41 the event and it'll change the whole name and I'm like oh man how do I yeah automatically change edit the title on a booking um it'll stick from then on it we won't change it again um what what happened early on like we used to just generate it in the beginning and then leave it at that and but then people would change the package and be really confused like oh it's not Deluxe why you know why

45:06 does it say Deluxe and so basically how it works is if if you go into edit title um it'll stick after that we won't we won't change it again if you put something in there yourself so okay even if I add the setup time a week before exactly yeah okay okay good to know yeah um yeah and in terms of those automations I would say like I say it's kind of a little little beyond the scope of what

45:31 we have time for but under the automated messages the leads you can set up um you know messages for after the booking um you know and then of course things like his the event gets closer um and stuff like that for sure so um so we made it to the add-ons um if I remember right the next step is backdrops and I don't know that there's much to go over there I mean it's pretty much

45:57 pretty much the same as the add-ons um anything to add on on backdrops no I mean obviously not every not every service uses backdrops number one um check Cherry if you're doing more than one booking at a time Check Cherry can manage the availability of the backdrops um we have accommodations for double-sided backdrops and I don't think we have to cover any of this but just something to be

46:21 aware of yeah we integrate with PB backdrops and you know Brian's a awesome and a popular service provider in the industry um and yeah not not too much to add there yeah yeah so venue name um we've got um you know we'll we'll collect the the name from the the venue and based on that you know we'll typically look up um your sales tax or travel fees um things like that um I don't

46:47 know do you want to go into that much J I think we should talk about travel fees because this is a really unique component of check charity and I think it also is it's a key area where you know if you're if you're if you have package pricing and you need profitable events I think travel fees are a really logical piece to making sure that you're making money and so somebody who's

47:11 15 minutes away versus an hour and 30 minutes away you know um is going to be a different price um and I also like that travel is like a specific line item it's not just thrown into the package price like they know what they're getting they know why it's being charged um and I don't think we have to get into like detail setup but very common that people offer free travel zones within

47:34 a certain range and then a Max travel zone you can check with check CH you can prevent people from booking outside that maximum travel zone um the travel fee is like uh the travel zones um quite frankly it's more complicated than we wanted but it it seems like it kind of has to be like that with what happens right I mean it's just just you know seems so simple and then it's kind of not um

47:57 but like in in the simplest case you know are you do you have a free zone what is it and then what's your Max and then what are you per mile typically um would be really common stuff and I would say if you service in an area where you're you know it's it's helpful in expanding your Market basically in traveling because people do travel quite quite far especially what kind of Southern California

48:19 and stuff yeah and this is also the step where we'll apply sales cap if you need to collect it in your state um not every state does you know for services a lot of states don't require that um so definitely you know definitely check um and sometimes there'll be kind of weird rules like you know if you're giving somebody something physical like a print out then it's a taxable

48:42 package and if if it's not then then it's not so beware that you set a price that you'll see a little taxable checkbox under there um so you can you can set different add-ons different packages things like that to taxable this this was a lot of work early on in Check Cherry's life this whole tax thing and we wanted to have a good solution for people yeah so you can have packages add-ons

49:03 be taxable or not taxable any combination of them um you know yeah probably worth mentioning so we integrate with tax dra to look it up by default you can also set a flat rate if you want but most people just just enable the tax rate integration and that's our tax jar account you don't need to sign up for tax jar or anything like that will we'll just we'll use that to look your tax rates

49:27 up so and it's based on the venue location not your business address if you will because I think the most common I mean you know event service providers have it hard because they're they're traveling around and establishing a you know tax Nexus in various areas and so this really makes that simple um and then there's awesome reporting to get it all that stuff but um while we're on

49:48 the Travel page couple more esoteric settings so this is what 99% of people you know are going to want your your Venue settings to be um but if you go to the service settings so this case DJ you can adjust a few things um you know by default will'll allow customers to provide any address you know auto complete and then um you may or may not want to let them skip that step

50:15 some people like to let the customer skip that and collect the venue later the problem with that is we're not able to calculate Tax and Travel until they give you a venue um so that's the trade-off thing and then sometimes people will call ven you know maybe they're not venues for you maybe they're locations or Properties or things like that um and then there's also um

50:32 again not so much for photo booth but for some other service types venues things like that um some people don't let their customer put in any address you know they might have just a a set of preferred locations you know maybe there's five or 10 places that that you know all of their bookings happen at and we'll you know if you choose that we'll we'll show kind of a nice little

50:54 preview of of um of the different venues for them you choose from or maybe you don't even collect an address at all so um those are options as well and then um and then we're almost done um but we're at the the extra question step and so this will not show up on a default account but if you have anything else you want to collect um that's where what we call like the custom

51:21 questions or extra questions uh booking questions um you can enable these and so where you'll find that is under manage booking engine and then extra questions and we've got a bunch in there already you know if you want to do things like you know collect the customers you know physical address um or you know where where people heard about you or setup times things like that um those

51:46 extra questions can be helpful um biggest thing is just keep in mind a lot of times people don't don't necessarily know everything front so um you know if you do particularly if you make something required sometimes that can cost you sales if you know if they don't know the answer yet so um so in general we kind of recommend putting putting things like that in you know until after they've

52:08 done until after they've booked you um but if you do have anything you want to collect up front people seem to like getting extra questions you know it's very common and um I think it's like if I would try to really minimize extra questions because it's just going to get in the way of closing sales in all likelihood um and so there's some got 15 I think default ones but you can add

52:31 pretty much anything you know you can add your own custom ones with different drop downs you know file Fields uh you know whatever you want to do so might might yeah but I would just say resist the temptation to ask too many questions especially if they're not relative to the price and like this you can get it after the sale you know good reason to reach out will show up on both on online

52:53 booking and with proposals so it um so you'll definitely get it before they before they sign so and also packages as well so like pretty much like what's it you know to me like a a reasonable extra question is a PO number an optional PO number during the online booking package for corporate package group type stuff like I get that we got some logic in there like if you do enable the PO

53:21 thing it'll show up on aut so um so some of these have some kind of you know just sensible logic kind of behind them but um Paul has a question about payments I'm going to get back to that Paul because we'll talk to about the payment stuff but Abe says any tips for making the back and forth template conversation seamless and easy for photo booth using check Cherry during the booking

53:42 process and so uh the short of it is the template selection is not a step in the booking process and it hasn't been U maybe it should be I think the reason it didn't make it in there to this point is because it typically doesn't impact the price um and I could see us adding it I mean I'm not strongly opposed to that um but I think the whole concept of the back and forth and all that other

54:07 stuff I think it just like and relative to the extra questions I think it just complicates the sale maybe you know now I'm giving somebody all these options um when they haven't even signed and paid you know just like get to the signature get to the deposit close that sale and do other stuff um check Cherry does have a designs feature where there's you know a whole workflow for uploading

54:29 artwork and clients approving it and uh there's a video on designs that if you're not familiar um with it after the booking you should check out or chat with us and we can share it with you um but during the booking process do you have any thoughts in terms of the design selection Matt no I think I think you covered it pretty well and then and then Paul's question is because

54:50 we're here at the payments side which is how does check Cherry handle other forms of offline payments like cash zel cash app yeah so once you get to the end of that booking process we'll see that one thing I want to call out before that is um not terribly long maybe in the last year we've we've added this add another package so if you do have additional you know as long as uh I

55:14 think I think you can enable or turn that on or off under booking engine settings U but if you do want to allow your customers to pick multiple packages and and each of those packages can have their own date times and add-ons and stuff like that um that can be useful as well so um but once they get to the end typically they're going to be able to either pay the deposit or the full balance

55:36 um the exception to that would be if it would you know if you've got your payment settings um set to where you require a deposit um you know say say you need your your final payment two weeks before the event and somebody books you less than two weeks before the event we're going to require the full payment up front so sometimes that gets people when they're testing things out um because

55:59 they'll put pick you know today is the date or something and then um and then they won't see that deposit option but in general they'll be able to pick that deposit and the customer on this step is going to sign as well so they're going to see your contract and sign that um I'm logged in as as the admin so we're not it's not going to have me sign um but the the the first time I I log in as

56:19 a customer um I'll have a kind of a prompt to sign and then let's take a look at the uh oops C something here me go back to my and also there's a one one cool feature while you're doing that um we have a feature where you can give them a link to resume booking a lead and you can also include that in automated messages um which is cool because some people might get here and not

56:48 finish take this hang on okay okay here we go so um at that point you're going to get your booking is not yet confirmed please make a payment to confirm your booking and so at that point we're going to show the different payment options that you offer um you know most if you've got striper or Square link or CH Cherry payments or or Square linked um will show Apple pay if they're on

57:12 an Apple device um you know credit card on on everything uh Google if they're on a on an Android device um and then for the things like like check or ven mode where they don't integrate with the website then basically what that does is it lets the customer kind of skip paying for now um you know as the customer I can hit confirm booking and that booking is going to go through but then

57:38 on the invoice it's going to say something like um about the customer customer indicated they will pay deposit later using venmo and so what you want to do is look for that that venmo payment and then you can apply that to their account so um you know how you want to you know whether you even want to allow those or not it's up to you some people um you know if you if you want

58:01 to make sure that you absolutely collect that deposit you can turn off the things like you know send a payment by check or if it were me it would be like card only and if you're worried about processing fees pass it along or raise prices um I don't like the you know indicate you're going to pay with check or VMO and then come back and like have to chase money down you probably have

58:23 something in your terms if you don't pay the full deposit like the whole benefit of check Cherry is like you're not going to have sales without signatures and deposits basically like I love that and you're losing that when you use those options those and there are a couple ways you can find people that you know under sales bookings we do have a way you can you know find for balance

58:40 or uh a waiting deposit um you can search for those or we even have a dashboard widget that'll that'll show some of that but um but it's up to you felipa the link for the for the resume booking it's under a lead yeah so yeah so if you go to a um let's see if we go to one of these leads here um what you can do is under actions there's a link to continue booking and so if I copy that it'll

59:09 it'll uh and send that to somebody um they can click that to to pick up where they left off you can also use that in automated messages we've got a a token for that um called I don't know what resume resume and so that'll automatically use it as well and that can even um that'll actually work with any lead um if you do have a lead in your system that you know that you manually added

59:35 or something like that um we won't skip the steps and pick them pick up where they left off because they didn't didn't fill anything out yet but um we will pre-fill in everything so that um so it's all kind of pre-filled for them ape says the Apple pay option is nice is a nice addition yeah and I would say um you're right Apple pay Google pay it's a really really easy way for people to enter a card

59:55 from their phone right that's sales and the thing that's easy to forget when you're kind of on your sitting on your computer setting everything up is is what a big portion of people just you know are using their phones for everything you know they're um usually when we look at it it's it's roughly half of people are are booking from their phone so things like the Apple pay or Google pay or things

1:00:16 like that are are real helpful for kind of uh you know making it easier and that's a big part of why we break it up into multiple steps as well well where um you know on your phone it's just kind of brutal when you have a thousand questions and and you know you get scrolled somewhere you can't see an error message so that's kind of what I'm trying to try to walk them through that way yeah

1:00:36 there's like there's like necessary complication to online booking in Che in check Cherry like you have to ask a lot of questions to give an accurate quote and we broke it up over multiple steps but if as much as you can keep things easy for the customer you know the more sales you'll get so I think it's just as simple as that Che different than stripe integration Paul says

1:00:57 um so there is some differences to check chry payments it's back by stripe um and there's kind of it's a tighter integration um and then but it's it's I mean it's effectively stripe um but you can use check Cherry payments and like it's you know payouts are integrated within the app and we have we have an old stripe integration that some people are still using and it doesn't have

1:01:21 any of this basically um and it shows more like activity and just it's just more fully integrated um and we'll be as we release new features they'll hit check Cherry payments um first and it'll just allow us to go uh faster and check payments is not available in Canada yeah yet there's like some banking type stuff it's I don't know how they do it we should be bu only at this time but yeah

1:01:48 it's um um in terms of what what the customer sees it's not not very different um but it is a little more integrated in terms of the [Music] experience um anything else you want to cover j i me want to show that that I think so um you know we're talking about you know on your on your packages you know you you have a bunch of different options um one of the things that's really useful is

1:02:16 is kind of the notion of of sending a link to a specific package so if you do have you know you're talking to somebody and you know the the wedding silver is perfect for them or you want to send them specifically to the to your wedding packages um that can be super helpful to send them a link directly there you can also do things like set the packages to private

1:02:36 and basically have special you know special packages with special pricing that you don't give everybody um you know maybe you don't want that to clutter up your page or maybe it's just a little bit you know better pricing that you don't give most people and then um and then even if it's uh a private package you can still still give links to it so um so that's real helpful as

1:02:57 well and you can even use those on your website I mean if you didn't want to show packages for some reason in general but you want to be able to link to them um some people will set set their packages to private and just link over to them for that and one last option we should probably cover are so under our Advanced package settings our default is allow on online booking um we do

1:03:24 have a couple of other options in there um display lead form which is I think real helpful if you have like you know say you've got a several packages but you've got one that you just use for maybe like corporate or kind of a build your own type of thing where it doesn't make sense to um you know you can't really give somebody a price that's a nice way to kind of ease into the online

1:03:46 booking where you show most of your packages but then for the more difficult stuff they're just going to fill out a lead form and you'll just um just collect their information and then we also do have what we call like a request for proposal mode and I think that's most useful for people that that want to be able to see and approve the bookings before they come in um kind of the

1:04:06 downside with that is now you've got a proposal now you need to you know take a look you need to send it to them to sign um you know they might not ever get your email or they might not sign it or things like that so I still prefer the online booking I think that's our recommended flow but um but some people do like that there are some reasons where people want to look at you

1:04:27 know there's some compelling reasons why somebody wants to review a proposal manually and send it out you're you're adding another the trade-off is you're adding another hurdle another step you know um in the process and you're kind of slowing things down I think those are the main on you didn't have enough time I mean there's a lot fast yeah um so maybe we'll have to do something

1:04:47 different maybe like break it up or anyway we'll have there'll be lots of opportunities if have feedback on the webinars stuff you want to see just chat with us from within your account you can send an email to support at Che Cherry you can chat with us here whatever it may be we're easy to get a hold of um the purpose of these is basically to help I mean it was I guess to take

1:05:09 a step back last trade show we did was you know how do I get the most out of check Cherry and this is one of our you know responses to that is to kind of just go through a little bit more in depth and have conversations you know that typee of thing about about check sharing the features and some best practices stuff we see um but it's yeah I mean I think that's good and and uh do

1:05:30 you got any final final words Matt no and yeah definitely feel free to reach out anytime with any questions and and uh and ask away so thanks thanks everybody for coming have a good night thanks guys bye later Paul thank you byebye