Booking Protection for Barbershops: Charge Late Cancels and No-Shows
Save the customer's card at booking and charge only if a late cancel or no-show fee applies. Built for UK barbershops. Stripe at cost, no platform markup.
Booking Protection is live for every barbershop on Setora. Save the customer's card at booking. Charge only if your policy applies. No platform fee, no markup, Stripe at cost.
The short version
- Booking Protection saves the customer's card at booking with their explicit consent. No charge is taken until your late cancel or no-show policy applies.
- Defaults are 50% for late cancels and 100% for no-shows. Both are configurable, and individual locations can opt out.
- Stripe at cost. Setora adds no commission, no platform fee, and no markup. You pay Stripe's standard processing fee, and only when a card is actually charged.
- Included in £14.99 per month per location. No upgrade, no separate plan, no surprise line on your invoice.
The real cost of an empty chair
Around one in seven barbershop bookings ends in a no-show or late cancel. We pulled the numbers in a separate post on what no-shows cost a UK shop, but the short version is this: a typical independent shop doing 10 bookings a day at £20 a cut loses roughly £8,400 a year to empty chairs.
That is not a small number. It is the price of a new chair, a refit on the front of the shop, or a month's wages for a junior. And it is being paid every year by shops that have not put anything in place to make the customer feel the cost of missing the booking.
Most shop owners try to fix this with deposits. A small upfront amount, taken at booking, that they keep if the customer fails to turn up. Deposits work, but they create friction at the front door. Plenty of customers will go elsewhere rather than enter card details for £5 they get back anyway.
Booking Protection is the version of this that does not charge the customer up front.
What Booking Protection actually does
When a customer books online, Setora asks them to save a card with their explicit consent. They see the exact late cancel and no-show amounts for the service before they tick the box. No card is charged at that point.
If they turn up on time, nothing happens. The card on file is never used.
If they cancel inside your late cancel window, or fail to turn up, the booking is marked accordingly and a fee is calculated against the saved card. Staff confirm the outcome in the Hub. They can charge or waive the fee depending on the situation, and a separate waiver permission means only authorised users can override a charge.
The defaults are 50% of the booking total for late cancels and 100% for no-shows. Both are configurable per organisation, and you can opt individual locations out if you run shops with different policies under one account.
Deposits and Booking Protection are not the same thing
This trips people up, so it is worth being clear.
Deposits take money up front. The customer pays a fixed amount at booking. If they cancel late, you keep the deposit per your policy. If they cancel in good time, it can be refunded. Deposits are visible, immediate, and the customer feels the commitment at the moment of booking.
Booking Protection does not take money up front. Setora saves the customer's card with their consent and only charges if a late cancel or no-show fee applies. The customer feels the commitment only if they fail to honour the booking.
You can run one, the other, or both. They combine cleanly. If a deposit has already been retained for a booking, it credits against the protection fee. A £10 deposit on a £30 cut means the no-show fee on the saved card is £20, not £30. The customer is never charged twice for the same missed booking.
At-cost Stripe: the boring promise that matters
Here is the part most barbershop platforms will not put in writing.
When you charge a customer through Setora, the money goes to your connected Stripe account. Setora adds no commission, no platform fee, and no markup on top of Stripe. You pay Stripe's standard UK processing fee at cost, and only when a card is actually charged. Stripe sends the customer their receipt directly.
That is it. No revenue share, no per-charge platform fee, no hidden cut.
Compare that with how the wider market works. Plenty of platforms advertise as free or low-cost, then take a percentage of every booking, every card charge, or every customer they decide is "new" on their marketplace. We wrote a separate breakdown of the hidden cost of free barbershop software if you want the receipts.
We charge £14.99 per month per location for the whole platform. Bookings, staff management, customer records, deposits, Booking Protection, kiosk system, the lot. SMS reminders are charged separately as credits because we pay the network for those, and we pass that through. Everything else is the £14.99.
When Booking Protection charges a card, you pay Stripe's standard fee for that transaction. Nothing else. That is the difference.
Setting it up in the Hub
The whole thing is in one place.
- Go to Payments in the Hub. Booking Protection sits alongside your existing deposit settings. They are separate, but they share the same area.
- Turn it on and set your percentages. The defaults are 50% for late cancels and 100% for no-shows. Most shops leave them. Some adjust based on service type or how strict their door policy is.
- Opt locations out if needed. If you run multiple shops and one of them takes a different approach, opt that location out. The rest carry on.
Existing deposit settings keep working alongside Booking Protection. You do not have to choose between them.
What the customer sees
The public booking page shows the exact late cancel and no-show amounts for the service the customer has picked, in plain pounds and pence. Below that is a dedicated consent box explaining that a card will be saved and only charged if a fee applies.
The customer ticks the box, enters card details, and the booking is confirmed. The slot is held for 15 minutes while they complete setup. If they abandon halfway through, the booking expires cleanly. No fake cancellation email, no stuck slot, no charge.
If you allow customers to cancel themselves online, they see the calculated fee before they confirm. That means an informed choice, every time, and the diary stays accurate either way.
If a charge fails for any reason, the booking status still changes. A no-show stays a no-show. The failed charge is surfaced on the booking with the Stripe failure reason so staff can follow up. Nothing is hidden.
Who this is for
If you are taking small deposits and they are not really moving the needle, Booking Protection is a stronger lever with less friction at the door.
If you are taking no deposit at all because you do not want to lose bookings, Booking Protection gives you a fallback without changing the customer's experience of booking.
If you are on another platform and paying a percentage on every protection charge, the at-cost Stripe model is worth a serious look. Run our no-show calculator against your shop's volume and see what the difference looks like over a year.
If you take walk-ins only and never accept online bookings, Booking Protection does not apply to you. The rest of the platform still might.
What is next
Per-location and per-service fee overrides are on the roadmap. So is exposing Booking Protection setup flows through the REST API. For now, customers complete card setup on your public Setora booking page, and protection state is read-only via the API.
Booking Protection is live for every barbershop on Setora today. There is nothing to upgrade. It is in the £14.99 per month per location subscription, included alongside everything else.
If you have not seen it yet, the Booking Protection feature page has the full breakdown and a mock of the customer flow. Or if you want to see all of what Setora does, the features index is the place to start.
Setora is built specifically for UK barbershops. Flat £14.99 per month per location. No commissions, no per-staff fees, no marketplace.