How to add online booking or payments to your website

There are four common ways to do it. They range from a simple link you can set up today to a system built around your business.

Most small businesses start with one of the first two. They are quick, cheap and well supported. The last two make sense when you outgrow them or need everything to work in one place.

Most providers charge a percentage of each payment plus a small fixed fee. There is often no monthly charge on the basic plan. The rates below are from each provider's UK pricing page at the time of writing (November 2026). Prices change, so check the current page before you decide.

As a worked example, a £60 appointment paid with a standard UK card through Stripe would cost 90p plus 20p, so £1.10 in fees. Cards from abroad cost more, and so do some extras such as instant payouts.

Look beyond the headline rate. Stripe charges £20 when a customer disputes a payment, and its standard refunds don't return the original fee. GoCardless prices exclude VAT, which it adds to UK merchants.

Booking tools charge in different ways. Some charge per location, some per member of staff, and some take a share of new customers they find for you. Work out the cost for your size of business, not just the starting price.

Free plans are a good way to test a tool. Check what they leave out. Square's free plan, for example, doesn't include cancellation fees or Google Calendar sync, which matter if you already run your diary in Google.

Start with how your customers buy, not with the software. A dentist, a dog groomer and a walking tour company all take bookings, but they need very different things.

1. 1 Write down what a customer buys: a time slot, a place on a date, a product or a fixed-price service.
2. 2 List what must happen at booking: full payment, a deposit, a card held on file, or no payment at all.
3. 3 Check what you already use. If you have a booking system you like, it may already offer a website widget or an API.
4. 4 Work out your typical sale and monthly volume, then compare total fees across two or three providers.
5. 5 Decide how much the booking page needs to match your website and brand.
6. 6 Test the full journey on a phone, as a customer would, before you go live.
7. 7 Make sure confirmation emails, reminders and refunds all work, not just the payment.

Deposits and no-show fees ask the customer to commit when they book. Many booking tools support them, and Fresha lists deposits, prepayment and cancellation fees among its features.

Square calls it prepayment and includes it on all its plans. Its no-show protection, which lets you hold card details and charge a fee for late cancellations, is on the paid plans.

Your terms need to be clear before anyone pays. GOV.UK says businesses selling online must explain how to cancel, and when the right to cancel is lost, before an order is placed. Customers usually have 14 days to cancel. If you don't tell them about this right, the period can extend to 12 months.

The rules have exceptions and work differently for some services and some types of booking. Read the GOV.UK guidance on online and distance selling, and get advice if your policy is unusual.

Put your cancellation and deposit policy on the booking page itself, in plain words, and repeat it in the confirmation email. A clear policy the customer saw before paying is far easier to stand behind than one hidden in your terms.

Any business that takes card payments must follow PCI DSS (the Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard). Stripe says that businesses handling card numbers directly may need to meet more than 300 security controls.

You can avoid most of that by using a hosted checkout, payment link or the provider's own card form. With these, card details go straight to the payment provider and never pass through your website. You still confirm your compliance each year, but the job is much smaller.

Your site also needs HTTPS. Stripe asks for payment pages to use TLS 1.2 or above (the encryption behind the padlock in the browser).

Strong customer authentication, or SCA, is a rule to reduce card fraud. It applies to many online card payments in the UK and Europe. The customer proves who they are with two of three checks, such as a code sent to their phone or a fingerprint in their banking app.

For online cards, this usually happens through 3D Secure, an extra step from the customer's bank after checkout. Your checkout has to support it, so check this with any provider you consider. Some small payments can be exempt, but the customer's bank decides.

This matters when you save cards for no-show fees. The customer authenticates when they first book. A later charge may then go through without them present, but the bank can still ask for authentication.

Most problems come from tools that don't talk to each other. Others come from costs nobody added up at the start.

• Double bookings, when your online diary and your real diary aren't synced.
• Fees that look small per sale but add up over a year, especially for foreign cards.
• Marketplace commission on new clients, if a booking tool also lists you in its app.
• Dispute fees and lost stock or time when a customer claims a payment back.
• Customer details split between your booking tool, your payment provider and your email system.
• A booking widget that looks out of place and puts people off at the last step.
• Reminder emails or texts that never send because nobody tested them.

For many small businesses, a ready-made booking tool or a payment link is the right answer. It is cheap to start, it works on phones, and the provider handles security and updates.

Custom booking makes sense when the tools force you to work around them. Examples include complex availability, group bookings, several sites, or a booking system that already holds your data. If a simple tool does the job, use it and spend the money elsewhere.

We build direct booking and appointment booking websites, and websites built around a client's existing booking system. We also build online shops. Where systems need to share data, our custom software and integrations work connects websites, CRMs, booking systems and supplier APIs.

Hosting, care and support come through our Website Care plan. If you want to talk through your options, use the Tell us about your project form, or see our pricing page.