Open Your shop and choose Start setup (or arrive from one of our trade pages and the first question is already answered). The setup asks six questions and fills in the usual answers for your trade - a barber sees a haircut, a skin fade and a beard trim at typical prices with a Tuesday-to-Saturday week; a personal trainer sees sessions, an early week and a health questionnaire. Change anything, untick anything, add your own.
Add everyone who takes bookings. If your plan covers fewer people than you add, the extra ones are parked: they stay in your list with a Parked label and come on the moment you upgrade. Nothing is refused and nothing is lost.
Say where customers come to you - your own place, a place you work from, or you go to them (then the booking form asks for their address). Type the address as street, town and postcode. Got more than one place? Add them all; if your plan covers fewer, the extra ones are parked until you upgrade, and the hours screen asks who works where. Check the small print - cancelling, notice, how far ahead, reminders - which comes filled in with sensible defaults.
Your page goes live by itself on the last screen, which shows your link, a printable QR card, a preview of your page and where to put the link. A bar at the top shows how far through you are.
Then the Getting started card on your dashboard has the optional extras, each ticked off as you do it: make your page yours (logo, colour, a photo and one of nine page styles, from Clean to Showcase with a picture on every service, under Your shop, Make it yours), bring your customers over (import your list from your old booking system or a spreadsheet as a CSV file; anyone already there is matched, never doubled), add the appointments already in your book so nobody can book over them, and take deposits (connect your own Stripe account; bookings work in the meantime without payment). Until you switch deposits on, nobody is asked for one. Prefer to keep the page private for now? Take it down any time from Your shop.
You can close the tab at any point and carry on later from where you left off. Your shop has Start setup again at the bottom if you ever want to run through the questions from the top; it never deletes anything.
Your trade sets the words too: a trainer's diary says session and client, a driving instructor's says lesson and pupil, a barber's says appointment and customer. Change any of the words under Your shop, Booking rules, and the diary, your booking page and the emails follow. If you run classes, there is a fifth: what groups book places in, which might be a class, a group booking, a workshop or a group lesson.