Squarespace is an all-in-one website builder, known for it’s ease-of-use and design features. With simple pricing and drag-and-drop website building, it’s a popular choice for small businesses to create a mobile responsive site in just a few hours and is our choice for best looking design.
If your website for tours, activities and experiences was built using Squarespace, choosing the best online booking platform is essential. With so many options, how do you choose the one that’s right for you? Is there a built-in option? Should you use a 3rd party widget like Eventbrite, or something that fits seamlessly onto your website and offers more control?
With multiple options available to choose, demystifying what good looks like can be a challenge. What should you look for in a booking provider? Our guide helps answer just that, so you can find the best solution to grow your business online.
How does it look and perform on your website?
Users have high expectations and this only continues to rise. Having a professional, visually appealing system is crucial to keeping customers on your Squarespace website. Users expect speed, ease of use, trustworthiness and convenience; vital factors to get customers to book with you. With approximately 68% of all internet traffic now coming from mobile visits, it’s more important than ever to make sure the mobile experience is seamless and easy to use.
Beyonk has invested heavily in user testing, watching millions of users interact with our software. For example, we found that 50% of users won’t wait more than 3 seconds for a page to load. This means you could be losing customers to a slow platform. In our tests, 60% decided not to buy if they needed to create an account first, so offering guest checkout is important to stop your customers going elsewhere.
We pride ourselves on our research and development, enabling us to optimise our technology for a slick user experience on any device. Our goal is to keep you and your customers happy.
Fresh out of the box: what’s available?
As part of your subscription, Squarespace allows you to create events pages on your website. The catch is, it doesn’t support bookings or recurring events out of the box. However, you can create bookings without 3rd party plugins. To do this, you’ll need to create a scheduling account and add them to your website using scheduling blocks. Account membership comes with 3 price plans: Emerging, Growing and Powerhouse.
The Emerging plan, priced at £11 – £12 per month, comes with calendar syncing, reminder emails and payment options such as Stripe, PayPal and card vaulting.
The Growing plan adds to this with SMS reminders, packages, gift certificates, memberships & subscriptions, priced at £20 – £22 per month.
The Powerhouse plan adds multiple time zones, custom API and supports HIPAA compliance, however this is aimed at US users. The Powerhouse plan is the only plan that allows you to hide the default “powered by Squarespace Scheduling” text and is priced at £37 – £40 per month.
All Squarespace websites have access to a free trial of the emerging plan. You can add bookings to your website using the scheduling blocks or display them in calendar form using calendar blocks.
Who is this option best for? Our verdict is that this is best suited for one-off appointment booking such as chiropractors or private classes. This option doesn’t appear to be built with events in mind. Whilst it is possible to create events for multiple people by setting up a group class, the scheduler is aimed much more at booking time slots than event booking.
At Beyonk, we believe in simplicity. For instance, there’s no complicated pricing, just a simple 4% fee and no hidden costs. We refund fees if the booking is cancelled. We don’t charge for onboarding or support, and we don’t charge for free events or tickets. There’s no minimum contract length, we believe in offering the best product and giving you the freedom to choose for yourself. See why Beyonk is the best booking system for your Squarespace website .
Acuity
Acuity Scheduling is a Squarespace company. Therefore, it shares nearly all of it’s features with the built-in scheduling. The key difference is that Scheduling is built into your Squarespace account. Both are available to use with scheduling blocks and both share the same or similar pricing.
Acuity offers a slightly broader range of features, such as different access levels for staff, integration with meeting applications such as Google Meet, Zoom and GoToMeeting. Both options provide a similar offering, but Acuity can function as a standalone product.
Going external: using an aggregate such as Eventbrite
Eventbrite is a popular booking website that makes it easy to set up events and offers a large audience. It’s possible to embed their widgets into your Squarespace website for users to complete their journey using their services and offer retargeting options. They offer multiple price plans depending on your needs.
Our verdict is that external bookings on aggregate websites can be useful to compliment your overall marketing mix. However, for booking on your Squarespace website it’s best to have a system intended for integration, not a standalone offering.
3rd parties often offer a large audience but connecting to the right audience can be tricky. Most importantly, the relationship with the customer is owned by the 3rd party. In our experience, the customer loyalty, sharing and relationship becomes tied to the provider instead of yourselves. This means that you’re potentially losing repeat customers to competitors who target similar events or experiences.
Beyonk is designed and optimised to get people excited and help you retain more customers, to drive repeat bookings. You work hard to reach customers and create memories for them, we want to ensure you keep them.
Going entirely bespoke
For large scale businesses, some opt for a bespoke option built from the ground up using providers such as ThinkBooker. Often, providers offer integration specialists and have experience developing for large websites and building complex systems. This may not be suited for a Squarespace website, however.
This option is best suited for large businesses looking for something that can tie into their internal systems. Typically this incurs a very high upfront cost, outside of the budget of most experience providers. For large websites looking to solve a very specific problem or need, this option may be necessary. However, for most SquareSpace websites this option would be considered excessive.
At Beyonk, there are no upfront costs. Our UK based team is here to help ensure your integration is as easy and painless as possible. We offer 24/7 support to help with any issues and ensure our system works best for you. Best of all, there’s no charge for our time.
The middle ground: integrated partners
Providers such as Ticket tailor, FareHarbor and Beyonk offer an easy to use booking system for Squarespace. They are designed to be used as an integrated system, not an external or standalone product. They offer affordable pricing, customisation options and are the best choice for event organisers or experience providers to offer their customers a visually appealing, easy to use experience. This option allows you to keep your branding and customer loyalty without high setup costs or long development times.
Whilst there are many to choose, at Beyonk we’re more than just a booking system provider for your Squarespace website. Therefore, there’s no lengthy integrations or unfriendly contracts. We help you get set up and we’re constantly working with the community to improving our offering. Most of all, we are actively working with leading tourists boards and bodies to help you to be seen by potential in-market customers. We partner with key bodies to promote your business through advertising campaigns promoting regions, outdoors sports and travel.
Choosing Beyonk
If you want to provide the best experience for your customers, take a look at Beyonk, the UK’s ethical and trusted booking system.
Our mission is clear: to make it easier to manage and grow your business. Beyonk is packed with tourism and leisure-specific features, 24 hour support, a UK team, free sign up and no contracts or minimum term lengths. Here’s why Beyonk is the best booking system for Squarespace…
More than just a Squarespace plugin
Beyonk is a fast, all-in-one system with fully customisable front-end booking and a powerful backend dashboard. This allows you to manage your business on-the-go, from any device, all in one place: calendar, enquiries, invoices and more. We’ve created an easy-to-use platform that’s easy to integrate into your Squarespace website, so you can continue to focus on creating breath-taking experiences for your customers.
Unlike other providers, we provide access to an exclusive distribution network of leading tourist boards, parks, forests, accommodation platforms and more. Beyonk have partnered with UK Tourist Boards such as Visit Cornwall and Visit Cumbria. We actively work on your behalf to get leading tourist boards to share your tours, activities, and experiences.
When customers book with you, you can set up automated drip-feed emails. This gives them the info they need to prepare for their trip and provides any updates. Encourage repeat purchases by automatically asking for reviews and follows on social media to build your online presence.
Beyonk is packed with features for your Squarespace website, such as free booking options for members, group discounts, gift aid, donations at checkout and much more.
Easy to integrate
Our solution is lightweight and fast. There are no up-front costs, just a 4% booking fee (similar to Paypal). Simply set up a code block on Squarespace, copy in our code and voila – you’re good to go.
We’ve designed everything to be as self-explanatory as possible, but our UK based team is always here to support you with live demos, support, video calls and face to face meetings. In addition, we have a wealth of support and digital marketing articles to make it easier to sell tickets online and grow your business.
Maximise revenue & customise your booking
Beyonk is here to help drive incremental value to your Squarespace website. Incentivise your customers using discount & affiliate codes then track incremental sales from partners.
Our platform allows you to customise your booking with multiple booking levels and memberships rates to maximise booking revenues. You can encourage sharing by offering gift vouchers at point of sale and encourage new customers. Further to this, you can promote up-selling by offering custom group discounts or create add-ons to provide more options to your customers. We also enable you to customise drip-feed emails ahead of upcoming events and retarget customers for repeat business.
We work to continuously offer more customisation options, and we take your feedback to decide what we develop next. At Beyonk, we’re dedicated to providing you the best booking experience for your Squarespace website.
Powerful reporting
To get the most out of your Squarespace website and drive more revenue, it’s important to stay on top of your performance. Spot trends and find improvement opportunities using our powerful reporting tool. Forecast customer spending, keep track of your financial performance and leverage rich customer data to get the very most out of your booking experience.
You can even connect to Tableau, PowerBI or your favourite data tools using our API for all the real-time reporting you need. If you need help, we’re always on hand to help get you set up and support you any time, free of charge. Our UK based team is here to help you optimise performance and grow your business.
Always updating
Our technology is developing fast, and the community are building it with us. We’re constantly testing and optimising for every micro-decision and friction point to provide the best experience possible for your Squarespace website. With this in mind, we listen to our community to tell us what to build to create a system they love. See our latest feature launches here.
What our customers say:
We’re very happy with Beyonk who are very responsive and helpful. It’s an easy platform to use and navigate around and it’s great we can customise our own information to make it suit our business.
– Bath Running Tours
Excellent system, easy to use and see all your bookings. Very easy to learn to use with all the online videos. Great customer care, look forward to working with Beyonk more moving forward
– IOW Mountain bikes
Why Beyonk?
Beyonk is run by a friendly UK based team. We’re passionate about delivering the best service, software and support to ensure our users are always happy.
Your success is our success, we’re here to help you grow your business. Get started now or book a demo.
