Guides
Deposits and no-shows: what actually works
No-shows are a scheduling problem, not a character problem. How deposits change behaviour, how much to charge, and why the way you explain the deposit matters more than the amount.
A no-show costs you the hour, the slot you turned someone else away for, and a bit of your goodwill toward the next customer who books. For a solo operator, a couple of them in a week is the difference between a good month and a flat one.
The reflex is to read it as rudeness. It’s usually not. Most no-shows are the same small failure repeated: someone booked three weeks ago, meant to come, and the appointment quietly stopped being real to them. Understanding that is what makes the fix obvious.
Why deposits work
A deposit doesn’t work because it punishes people. It works because it makes the appointment *real* at the moment of booking.
An unpaid booking costs nothing to make and nothing to abandon. There is no moment where the customer has to decide whether they actually want this. A deposit — even a small one — creates that moment. They pause, they think about the Thursday in question, and they either commit or they don’t. Both outcomes are better for you than a maybe.
The second effect is quieter and just as useful: a customer who has paid something will *cancel* rather than vanish. That’s the real win. A cancellation you get two days out is a slot you can refill. A no-show at 2pm is an hour you’ll never sell.
You’re not trying to make no-shows expensive. You’re trying to make cancelling easier than disappearing.
How much to charge
There’s no universal number, but there are two bad answers and a good range.
Too small is genuinely pointless. A $5 deposit on a $180 service doesn’t create the pause. It’s a rounding error, and all it does is add a payment step to your booking flow for no behavioural return.
Too large costs you new customers. Someone who has never met you is being asked to hand over money to a stranger on the internet. Half the service price is a lot of trust to ask for up front, and plenty of people will simply close the tab.
In practice, somewhere between 15% and 30% of the service price does the job for most businesses. High enough to be felt, low enough not to be a barrier. If your services vary a lot in price, set deposits per service rather than picking one flat number — a deposit that’s sensible for a two-hour job is absurd for a fifteen-minute one.
Consider deposits on your long or high-value services only. That’s where a no-show actually hurts, and it keeps the quick, cheap services frictionless for first-timers who are still deciding whether they trust you.
How deposits work in Bookka
Deposits are set per service and taken through Stripe at the time of booking. You connect (or create) a Stripe account from your dashboard, and from then on any service with a deposit collects it as part of the booking flow. Bookka never stores full card numbers — that’s Stripe’s job, and it’s the right way round.
When a refund is due under your cancellation policy, it goes back through Stripe automatically and the booking moves into a clear refunded state. The customer is told by SMS and/or email, so nobody is left wondering. The full mechanics are in Payments and Cancellations & refunds.
Payouts, disputes and chargebacks follow Stripe’s own rules and timelines. Worth reading those once before you turn deposits on, so nothing surprises you later.
The explanation matters more than the amount
This is the part most businesses get wrong, and it’s free to fix.
A deposit framed as suspicion reads as suspicion. "A deposit is required to prevent no-shows" tells a brand-new customer that you’ve decided in advance they’re the problem. It works, but it costs you something at the exact moment you’re trying to build trust.
The same deposit framed around the work reads completely differently: *"A 20% deposit holds your slot and comes off your final price."* Nothing has changed except that the customer now understands what they’re getting — a held appointment — rather than what they’re suspected of.
- Say what the deposit does ("holds your appointment"), not what it prevents.
- Say it comes off the total, if it does. Plenty of people assume it’s an extra fee.
- Say when it’s refundable, in the same breath. A clear cutoff removes the fear of losing money to a genuine emergency.
Deposits alone won’t fix it
A deposit stops the casual no-show. It does nothing about the person who genuinely forgot, and forgetting is still the bigger category.
That’s what reminders are for, and the two work together: the deposit makes the appointment real at booking, the reminder makes it real again the day before. We’ve written about getting reminders right in Reminders that actually get people through the door.
The third piece is a cancellation policy that people can actually follow — one clear cutoff, explained once. That’s covered in Writing a cancellation policy you can actually enforce.
A reasonable starting point
- 1Connect Stripe from your dashboard.
- 2Add a deposit of roughly 20% to your longest or highest-value services only.
- 3Set a cancellation cutoff you’d be comfortable defending out loud — 24 or 48 hours suits most businesses.
- 4Rewrite your booking-page wording so the deposit is described as holding the slot and coming off the total.
- 5Leave it alone for two months, then look at what your no-show rate actually did.
The last step is the one people skip. Deposits are easy to add and easy to over-tune. Give the change enough time to show you something real before you touch it again.
Run this on Bookka
Online bookings, deposits, automatic reminders and a cancellation policy that applies itself — in one place.