Service Packages: Get Paid for Five Appointments Today
December was the best month you’ve had. You worked six days a week, and you were tired in the good way.
Then January arrived and the phone went quiet. The same clients who came every five weeks in the autumn suddenly went eight, nine, eleven weeks. Nobody left you. They all just paused at once, in the month your rent didn’t.
A service package is the tool for exactly that gap — it moves money and commitment forward, from the months when clients are eager to the months when they drift.
The short version
- A client buys several visits at once, at a discount you set, and redeems them one appointment at a time.
- You pick everything: the service, the number of visits (2 to 20), and the discount (up to 50%).
- The money comes in at purchase, not visit by visit — which is the whole point in a slow month.
What is a service package?
A service package is a bundle of the same service — five gel manicures, three silk presses, four lash fills — that a client pays for in one transaction at a discount you choose, then books one visit at a time until the package is used up. She’s buying visits, not a gift card, and each one is redeemed by booking with you the normal way.
The reason it works isn’t the discount. It’s that a client who has already paid for four more appointments is a client who comes back four more times. You have turned a maybe into a commitment, and she got a better price for making it.
How you set one up
Two screens, about a minute.
Choose the service you want to bundle. It has to be a service already on your menu, and for now you can run one package per service, so pick the one clients repeat most often rather than your most expensive.
Then set two numbers: how many visits are in the package, and what discount the client gets for buying them together. Tap Create Package and it appears on your profile for clients to buy.
What the money actually looks like
Run it on your own prices before you decide on a discount. Card processing on a package is 2.9% of the total, taken once:
| Your service | Package | Discount | Client pays upfront | You keep after 2.9% | Per visit |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| $60 | 5 visits | 10% | $270.00 | $262.17 | $52.43 |
| $60 | 5 visits | 20% | $240.00 | $233.04 | $46.61 |
| $150 | 3 visits | 10% | $405.00 | $393.25 | $131.08 |
| $150 | 3 visits | 15% | $382.50 | $371.41 | $123.80 |
The trade is plain. Five $60 manicures sold one at a time are $300 of service value; sold as a 10% package they’re $262.17 in your account today, and the tips arrive as she does — about $12 a visit assuming a 20% tip, so $60 across the five. You gave up roughly $38 and bought five booked appointments and the cash to get through a slow month.
That’s a good trade in January and a bad one in your busiest season, when those five slots would have sold at full price anyway. Packages are a tool for filling a quiet stretch, not a permanent price cut. You have the flexibility to offer them when it’s best for your business.
The rules worth knowing before you sell one
- Packages are redeemed by the client booking, not by an appointment you create on her behalf. If you’re used to putting regulars on the calendar yourself, this one will catch you out.
- They don’t expire. Her remaining visits stay hers.
- Editing or pausing doesn’t touch anyone who already bought. They keep the original price and terms; pausing only hides the package from new buyers.
- A no-show or late cancel forfeits one visit, according to your own cancellation policy — so the policy you already set is the policy that applies.
Who can turn it on
Service packages are a Premium feature, and you need StyleSeat Payments switched on and $1,000 in lifetime processing on the platform before the option appears. That last gate exists because a package is money taken for work not yet done — the track record protects clients, and it protects you from competing against someone selling packages they have no intention of honouring.
Five appointments is five conversations
There’s something the spreadsheet version of this misses. When a client buys five visits, you stop selling to her every six weeks and start doing the actual work — the grow-out plan you’ve been describing since February, the colour that needs three sessions to get right, the point in a set of lash fills where you finally know exactly how she sleeps.
You have had clients you only ever saw once, and clients you have watched through a wedding and a baby and a bad year. The second kind is the reason you like this job. A package is a small mechanism that makes more of them, which is a strange thing to say about a payment feature, and true anyway.
Start with one
Pick the service your regulars book most, set it at three or four visits, and take 10% off. Not your whole menu, not 30% — one package, one honest discount, offered to people who were coming back anyway. Then watch what happens in the quiet month. The clients who bought are the ones who show up in January, and they show up already paid.
Frequently asked questions
Who can create a service package?
Service packages are available on the Premium plan once you have StyleSeat Payments turned on and $1,000 in lifetime processing on StyleSeat. The processing requirement exists because a package is payment taken before the work is done, so a track record is required first.
How many visits can a package hold, and how big a discount can I give?
Between 2 and 20 visits, at a discount of up to 50%. Most professionals do better starting at three or four visits and 10% — enough to be worth it to a regular, small enough that you’re not discounting work you would have sold at full price.
What does my client pay, and what comes out of it?
She pays the discounted total in one transaction, plus the $2.35 booking fee once at purchase — the appointments she books to redeem the package carry no booking fee. Card processing on the package total is 2.9%. On a five-visit package of a $60 service at 10% off, she pays $270 and you keep $262.17, with tips paid separately at each visit.
What happens if a client no-shows or I want to stop offering a package?
A no-show or late cancellation forfeits one visit from her package, following your own cancellation policy. If you edit or pause a package, anyone who already bought keeps their original price and terms — pausing only hides it from new buyers.
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