Most appointment businesses sell things as well as time — the wax, the shampoo, the aftercare kit — and most booking software either ignores that or gets the counting wrong.
01 Two ways to sell
Attach a product to a service and it is offered as an upsell while the customer is booking, or ring it up against the appointment at the counter afterwards.
Products sell once per booking rather than once per occurrence, so a weekly course of twelve does not sell twelve bottles of shampoo.
02 The count stays right under pressure
Stock decrements by the quantity actually sold, not by one per sale, and the check happens inside the same write that takes it — so two customers buying the last two bottles at the same instant cannot both succeed.
A database constraint keeps the figure from going negative even if something writes to it directly. Cancel a sale and the stock returns exactly once, however many times the cancellation is retried.
Questions
- Can I sell a product without an appointment?
- Products are attached to appointments today. A standalone till is not part of the product.
- What happens when something is out of stock?
- It stops being offered, and an attempt to sell it is refused rather than taking the count below zero.
- Can different products be offered for different services?
- Yes. Products are linked to the services they belong with, so the aftercare kit appears with the treatment it is for.
