PetGroomBossPro Blog — Online Booking & Quotes

Pricing Your Grooming Services So the Quote Holds Up in the Driveway

An instant price is only as good as the prices behind it. If your booking page says $85 and you find yourself asking for $120 at the van door every other visit, the page is not helping you. It is making promises you cannot keep. This article is about setting up your service list so the price a customer sees online is the price that holds up on the day.

Start With the Client You Already Have

One-click convert, covered in One-Click Convert: Turning a Grooming Sign-Up Into a Client Record, gets new clients into the system. Before you open the booking page to new clients, though, it helps to look at the ones you already groom.

Think about your last few months of work. Which services do you actually do most? Which dogs take longer than you charge for? Which add-ons do customers ask for again and again? Your own history is the best guide to your prices. This is not advice on what to charge; it is a way to make sure the numbers you set reflect your own work.

Keep the Service List Short

PetGroomBossPro uses one service list for everything: the booking page, estimates and invoices. The frequency is picked per client, so you do not need separate services for every schedule.

A short, clear list is easier for customers to choose from and easier for you to keep accurate. A common set for a mobile groomer might be:

• Full Groom
• Bath & Brush
• Puppy Intro Groom
• Cat Groom
• Lion Cut
• Nail Trim
• De-Shedding

Everything else can usually be an add-on or an estimate.

Base Price, Then Size Steps

The booking page builds each pet's price as the service base plus the add-on for its size. So the base price is really the price for your smallest common case, and the size steps do the rest.

A useful exercise: for each service, think of a typical Small, Medium, Large and Giant dog you groom. How much longer does each size take than Small? Set the size add-ons so the extra time is paid for. Because size add-ons apply across services, check that your steps make sense for both a full groom and a bath & brush. Size pricing is covered in more detail in Setting Size Prices for Toy, Small, Medium, Large and Giant Dogs on Your Booking Page.

Add-Ons: Price the Time

Add-ons are easy to underprice because the product is cheap. Teeth brushing might use very little product, but it takes time, and time on a mobile route is limited. Set add-on prices by the minutes they take as well as what they cost you. A $15 add-on that takes ten minutes may be worth it; one that takes twenty may not.

The Minimum: What a Stop Is Worth

For a mobile groomer, every stop has a fixed cost: drive time, parking, setting up the van, cleaning up afterward. A minimum on the booking page protects you from bookings that do not cover it, like a single nail trim across town.

Set the minimum based on what a stop costs you, not on what your cheapest service costs. If a customer only wants a nail trim, they see the minimum, and you can decide whether to be flexible for existing clients nearby.

Write the Exceptions Down

No price list covers every dog. Matting, heavy shedding, a pet that needs a slower groom: these change the job. Rather than trying to price every exception on the booking page, use the note under the price to warn customers that the price can change, and use estimates for jobs you already know are unusual.

The rest of this series covers several of the common exceptions: matted dogs, giant breeds, double coats and monthly accounts.

Test the Booking Page Yourself

Once your prices are set, book a few pretend grooms on your own booking page. Try a single small dog, a large doodle every 6 weeks with teeth brushing, three dogs at once, a cat, and a nail trim on its own. Does each price look like what you would have quoted on the phone? If not, adjust the base, the size steps, the add-ons or the minimum until it does.

Then watch the real requests. Leads shows every booking with the price the customer saw, so after a few weeks you can see whether any service or size is consistently coming in too low.

Same Prices Everywhere

Finally, use the same prices for the booking page, phone quotes and estimates. When one number lives in one place, the customer who books online and the one who calls get the same answer. For the rest of the booking and quoting tools, visit the pet grooming booking software page.