A no-show is not a gap in the diary. It is a slot you turned other people away from.
Most businesses that start taking deposits do not do it to collect the money. They do it because a customer who has paid something has made a decision, and a customer who has only picked a time has not.
Start smaller than you think
The instinct is to ask for half. The number that works is usually much lower — enough that forgetting is inconvenient, low enough that nobody hesitates at the last screen. For a £40 service, £10 does most of the work.
The reason is that the deposit's job is psychological, not financial. It is not compensation for the lost slot — no realistic deposit covers that. It is the difference between a booking that lives in the customer's head as a plan and one that lives there as a possibility. That difference is bought cheaply, and raising the price of it past the point of hesitation buys nothing more while quietly costing you bookings from the honest majority.
Ask for it on the services that hurt
A fifteen-minute appointment that goes unfilled costs fifteen minutes. A four-hour one costs the afternoon. Deposits are set per service in VoltsBook for exactly this reason — put them where a gap is expensive, and leave the quick jobs frictionless.
The scale runs further than most people push it. On genuinely large work — a full-day detail, a multi-hour colour correction — the deposit should stop being a token and become a real share of the price, in the hundreds where the job is in the thousands. At that end of the scale you are no longer nudging the forgetful; you are filtering the uncommitted before they cost you a day. The worked example for the biggest version of this is in ceramic-coating-pricing.
When the deposit should be the whole price
Two cases. First, the very small appointment: on a £15 service, the administrative theatre of a £5 deposit is not worth its keep — pay in full, done, and the no-show problem disappears entirely. Second, the repeat offender: after the second silent no-show, "we take payment in full when you book now" is a fair and complete answer, and it converts a chronic risk into either a reliable customer or someone else's problem.
Say what happens to it
The single biggest cause of abandoned bookings at the payment step is not the amount. It is not knowing whether the deposit comes off the final price. Say so, in the sentence next to the button.
The same honesty applies to cancellation. A deposit that is kept whatever the customer does is a surcharge, and customers price it as one. The shape that reads as fair: cancel or move the appointment outside your notice window and the deposit follows the booking or comes back; inside the window, it is kept. Which window, and what the wording should say, is the policy question — the salon version is written out in salon-no-show-policy.
The deposit is one layer, not the system
A deposit changes who turns up; it does not remind the forgetful, it does not make rescheduling easy, and it does not refill the slot when someone cancels anyway. Those are the other three layers — reminders that let people act, an easy exit door, and a waiting list for recovery — and the whole system is laid out in the-no-show-playbook. And if you are still choosing a tool, whether it can take a deposit at all is not a given — we checked eighteen of them in booking-software-with-deposits.
Does taking deposits reduce bookings?
It filters them. The bookings a small, clearly-credited deposit costs you are heavily weighted toward the ones that were not going to arrive, which is the trade you wanted. Keep the amount below the hesitation point and say it comes off the bill.
Should a deposit be refundable?
Outside your notice window, yes — refundable or movable to the new booking, and said plainly. Inside the window, kept. A deposit with no refund path whatever the circumstances reads as a fee and shops as one.
Deposit or card on file?
A deposit is money that exists; a card on file is an argument you have scheduled for later. Charging a stored card after a no-show invites disputes, and the dispute usually costs more than the fee. Collect at booking instead.