Full-stack salon booking platform — deposits, SMS reminders, variants, gift certificates, and staff management

The problem

Bookings were arriving through Instagram DM with no deposit gate and no automated reminders — no-shows were a persistent cost, and the operator had no tools to manage staff schedules, track payments, or run client communications without doing it manually.

Approach

• Django frontend serving the public site — bilingual service catalog with categories, photo gallery auto-organised by subdirectory, reviews page with multi-source aggregation, scheduled promotions with six visual themes and custom scheduling windows, and a contact form with honeypot and time-trap anti-spam
• FastAPI booking engine with MySQL — real-time availability calculation respecting business hours, per-staff hours, recurring breaks, time-off blocks, and existing appointments; 15-minute configurable slot intervals across a 90-day booking window
• Service variants system — size, length, style, and add-on groups each carry their own price delta and duration delta, applied dynamically at booking and stored with the appointment record
• Stripe Checkout for payments with two configurable modes: full payment upfront or a deposit now with the remaining balance collected in-salon; tax rate and deposit percentage configurable per environment
• Coupon management — percent-off or flat-amount codes with usage limits and validity windows, applied at checkout and snapshotted on the payment record
• Gift certificate purchase via Stripe Checkout — generates a unique code, emails the recipient a branded PDF with a QR code, and tracks the remaining balance across partial redemptions
• Automated SMS reminders via AWS SNS — 24-hour and 2-hour alerts sent to opted-in customers; reminder delivery tracked per-appointment to prevent duplicate sends
• HTML booking confirmation emails with a PDF attachment and an iCalendar (.ics) file — customers can add their appointment directly to any calendar application
• Customer accounts with email activation, login, profile management, full booking history, and self-serve reschedule and cancellation through an authenticated portal
• Staff portal with a personal calendar, daily appointment schedule, recent client list, client search, earnings report, time-off requests, and recurring break management
• Admin CRM covering appointment management, customer records with CSV bulk import, staff management with impersonation, payment history and statistics, review moderation with Google My Business sync, and a dynamic key-value settings store

Outcome

• No-show rate reduced by 40% — the deposit gate changed client behaviour immediately
• End-to-end booking flow replaces Instagram DM: browse services, select a variant and staff member, pay a deposit, receive a PDF confirmation with a calendar invite
• Staff manage their own availability and time off without admin involvement; operators oversee the full schedule, payments, and client history from one dashboard
• Gift certificates drive incremental revenue and are self-serve for both purchase and redemption