Feature of The Month - Online Tanning Payments

We know a lot of our customers have been waiting for this feature for a little
while, and we’re happy to announce its almost here! We recently released our online deposits feature for hair, beauty, clinic and spa deposits and have since been working hard to get our release ready for tanning salons. The salon world is ever changing and the post-Covid era is making online payments one of the most popular forms of payment for customers.

How Will Our Online Payments Work?

As with our online deposits, our online payments will work through our seamless integration with Stripe, allowing customers to pay with card, Apple Pay, Google Pay and Klarna.

When a customer goes to book, they will see any remaining minutes they have in a services drop down and any available to purchase for that bed. If a customer wishes to purchase some new minutes, they can select the course or minutes package they want to purchase from the drop down. This will then take them through to Stripe where they will pay with their chosen method, once the payment has gone through, they will see a payment successful screen and then have the option to continue with their booking.

Once they have completed their booking this will show in your Salon Tracker system as an online booking, with the customers purchase being stored on their account. With online payments being activated for tanning, customers won’t be able to create a booking without purchasing minutes, helping to boost your sales!

Why Should You Implement Online Payments?

The main benefit of introducing online payments into your salon is that it makes
the customers salon experience much more seamless! Giving them the ability to book and purchase minutes online not only improves their customer journey, but also makes your lives much easier in the salon with reduced waiting times.

Customers are now using cash a lot less frequently, and it’s estimated that in
2026 the UK will become a cashless country. Many people prefer the convenience and ease of use of being able to pay for a service online. By integrating with Stripe, we have been able to offer a secure and safe payment method, so you and your customers are able to use our payment platform without the worry of information being at risk.

Revenue generated from online payments goes directly into your bank account through Stripe, and with any customers that opt to pay through Klara the full amount is sent directly to you. So, you don’t have to worry about following up on any payments, as there are all dealt with through Klarna.

How Do I Get my Online Deposits Set Up?

Our online payments feature is expected to be released for tanning salons shortly. If this is a feature you are interested in, we are looking for a handful of customers to test this for us, so feel free to give us a call or email on info@salontracker.co.uk and we will be happy to add you to the waiting list.

The feature is only available for our Enterprise Customers, if you wish to upgrade, please contact us and we will be able to arrange this with you.

If you would like to see this feature in person, we will be exhibiting at the Professional Beauty London Show on the 3^rd and 4^th of April on stand Q32! Feel free to come down and visit our stand for an in-person demo and to meet the team, we look forward to seeing you there.

Salon Tracker x

Our New Release

As Salons start to become busier going into Spring, we have some new features in our latest release that we hope you’ll be able to utilise. Hopefully these new features will help to improve the day to day running of the Salon and generally increase overall efficiency.

Salon Tracker Solo

An exciting new edition to Salon Tracker is our BRAND NEW package ‘Solo’. This package has been tailored to suit the needs of those who are a single person Salon. Within this package, you will be able to have one Bookable Item whether it may be a single Technician or a single Sunbed. For information on this package, feel free to give our Sales Team a call on 0113 350 8230 or drop us an e-mail at info@salontracker.co.uk.

Clocking-in

Clocking-in is a popular feature on Salon Tracker to enable employers to track and monitor hours worked by their staff members. A basic version of clocking in is available in which you can simply clock in by clicking on your username within the system, and also a more enhanced version can be used in which you can clock-in with secure ID. Previously, the forms of secure ID that could be used included Fingerprint and Barcodes. However, we have added an additional form which is clocking in by password. Each employee can be assigned a password which they require to clock-in, ensuring that it is definitely them.

 

Virtual Timer

Another new feature we’ve added for our tanning customers is for use with a virtual timer. For Salons who use tokens to operate their sunbeds, it can be difficult sometimes to determine the wait time for any customers who come into the salon. With the addition of this new feature, you’ll be able to improve the accuracy of your wait time because if you can see that a customer has started the bed before the end of the dress down time, you can click to say the bed has begun.

 

Salon Holiday Feature

The final major feature we’ve added is the ability to add in whole Salon Holidays. Previously you would have had to add in holidays for each different technician/sunbed, which could be very time consuming, especially for national holidays such as the Christmas period, and also for our colleges who have long periods of time off such as the Summer Holidays. Now you can add in a whole salon holiday and it will block out that time period out for the entire salon.

 

If you have any questions regarding any of our new features, please feel free to drop us an e-mail at info@salontracker.co.uk and of course as always if you want to chat to a member of our sales and marketing team for a few extra tips, we are always on hand to help you with any marketing tools, or simply to offer further advice on using our software functions!

Salon Tracker x

The Salon Magazine Edit with the Sun Centre - Ormesby Bank

As some of you may remember, we ran a festive giveaway in December of which one of the prizes was generously given to us by The Salon Magazine - a free editorial in one of their Magazines! One of our lovely clients - Kev Conway @ Sun Centre won this and we wanted to give you guys a sneaky peak of the article before it is published in their next release!

Kev Conway – Sun Centre Ormesby Bank


When did you open your popular Tanning shop?

We opened on the 9th of March 2002 at our location on Ormesby Bank, Middlesbrough. We opened a second location 28th of October 2019, which may have been one of the worst times to open with the beginning of COVID in 2020. Luckily for us, Salon Tracker froze our payments for the duration of all lockdowns so we weren’t paying for software in such a difficult time. We were however still able to use the software to gather things such as reports and rearranging bookings.

Over the years we have been involved in many charity fundraisers. We have jumped off of the transporter bridge, jumped out of a plane and completed in sports activity days to raise money for a local charity called Zoe’s place baby hospice. As well as this, we regularly raise money for Children in Need and Christmas jumper day, which raises money for Save the Children charity. Salon Tracker have helped raise donations by generously donating text messages to notify our customers of upcoming charity events.

What inspired you to open your tanning Salon? 

I set up the business when I was 16 with my dad. He had been in the home hire tanning business since 1981 and I was keen to open a shop. After a lot of searching, I found an ex NHS clinic which was to be auctioned. My dad was happy to ‘have a go’ at setting up a tanning salon, as if it didn’t work, he would have sold the equipment and rented the building. We went to the auction and the bids just kept going higher and higher. The winning bid was our last bid and I was over the moon. It took a lot of work to set up, as I was at college and had to juggle my studies with setting up pricing structures, finding equipment, a lot of internal demolition and re-building. The business worked and we grew from strength to strength over the years. As we grew, I invested in the newest and best equipment I could find. We started to get a reputation as the best and the cleanest in town. We work hard to maintain that reputation to this day.


Why is the charity Zoe’s place close to your heart? 

The charity work started after a visit to Zoe's place baby hospice which is a local charity that provides palliative, respite and end of life care for infants 0-5 years living with life limiting or life-threatening conditions. We have worked with them many times over the years, as well as extended our fundraisers to include Christmas jumper day for Save the Children and Children in Need. We have a great sense of community in our business, they have become like an unofficial hub. Charity work such as this means our customers and the community can be a part of helping those who need it most.

How long have you been working with Salon Tracker? 

We’ve operated with Salon Tracker since 2008, back when it was Studio Tracker. We originally moved to a software-based system to try and speed up our customer service time. It helped massively with this. We were not only able to serve customers faster but also had a large amount of information instantly about each individual customer; such as their preferred tanning unit, their usual session time and usual package purchase. This allowed us to provide a more personal service to the customer.

What can you tell us about your experience with Salon Tracker? 

We’ve watched Studio Trackers functionality grow and eventually rebrand to Salon Tracker. We have taken advantage of Salon Tracker's increasingly updated and additional features over the years. Features such as the customer signature pad mean we can store a legal digitally signed document for every customer who signs up. This means we do not have to store endless amounts of signed paper documents, should we have any liability issues the customers' documents are available at the touch of a button.

What are your favourite features in Salon Tracker?

Other features we have taken advantage of are the addition of the HQ. The HQ provides me with an office-based point of access to each of my salon locations. This means I can monitor, amend and manage my locations without having to be physically on site. My staff also have the comfort of knowing if they have an issue, they can call me and I can help resolve over the phone.

Any other general thoughts you’d like to share?

When I first decided to move my customer database to a salon management system, my main concern was, what if I had an issue with the system or database and weren’t able to serve my customers? My mind was eased with Salon Tracker because their customer service and technical team are always just a phone call away. With the addition of the cloud-based database, I have comfort in the knowledge that should any of my operational PC’s have a physical issue, my database is intact and can be moved to another PC.

In summary Salon Tracker has helped to streamline my business and allowed us to serve more customers quickly, which results in more sales overall.

Salon Sustainability

Sustainability is a hot and very important topic right now. In this week’s blog we’re going to share with you some of our tips on how you and your Salon can operate in the most sustainable way.

Small Changes

I know making changes to the way you run your business may seem daunting but one of the best things you could do to make your salon more sustainable is to make small changes in the day-to-day running’s of your salon.

Hair Foils

One small change you could make in your hair salon would be to make the switch from one use foils when doing colour treatments to an alternative which could be reusable or biodegradable. One company doing this which we love is Paper Not Foil UK | Sustainable hair foils | Order Online

Tan Pots

A similar change you could make in your tanning salons is instead of selling sachets of cream, you could sell ‘tan pots’ in reusable containers. They way this would work is instead of sachets you could sell your customers a reusable container which they would be able to pay for topping up from larger bottles if they would rather do this than buy a full bottle. By encouraging customers to bring back the tan pots and just refill them, this would create a lot less waste than if they were to buy a sachet every time they came.

Washing

We know that for many salons, washing things such as towels, cloths and other reusable equipment is a vital step in making sure your salon is clean and runs efficiently. One small thing that you could do is ensure that when you’re putting a load of washing on, make sure you’re doing just one full load rather than multiple partial loads. As well as this making your salon more sustainable, this will also save you money.

Paperless System

 As well as these small changes, one of the simplest and most effective changes you could make is moving from a paper-based system to a computer-based system such as Salon Tracker. Making this move saves waste from things such as client cards and also paper agreement forms. When you move to a software from a paper-based system everything will be stored electronically in one place meaning your salon will not only be greener, but also more organised and easier to run.

One feature that Salon Tracker has in order to help you reduce paper waste is the option for your customers to electronically sign your agreement which will then be stored in the customer cards as a PDF rather than you needing to print off your agreement for them to sign.

Also, if you’re thinking about implementing a paperless system but are apprehensive about the cost to do so, the UK government are currently offering a 50% funded discount for your business to get software with the new digital software grant. If you would like more information on this either contact us at Salon Tracker or click the following link: Help to Grow: Digital - Diagnostic Tool (learn-to-grow-your-business.service.gov.uk).

If you would like any more information on any of these tips or if you would like to get signed up for your free demonstration and two-week trial of Salon Tracker, please don’t hesitate to give us a call on 0113 350 8230 or email us on info@salontracker.co.uk.

Salon Tracker x