Booked & Profitable

You’re not losing bookings after the sale, you’re losing them before the click.

In this episode of Booked & Profitable, we break down the 3 most common conversion killers hiding inside your booking flow. From buried buttons to broken forms, we walk through exactly where friction happens, and how to fix it before your next drop.

What you'll learn:
  • Why your best customers are bailing before checkout
  • The 3 critical clicks that either keep or kill momentum
  • Real examples from F&B, tourism, and creative brands
  • How to apply the Flow → Fields → Feedback framework to your site
This one’s tactical, diagnostic, and ROI-driven.
Fix your flow, boost your bookings.

Creators and Guests

Host
Mark Sandeno
SR
Host
Sam Robertstad

What is Booked & Profitable?

Booked & Profitable is the podcast for physical retailers ready to grow with smarter systems, better tools, and a storefront that actually sells.

Hosted by Mark Sandeno and Sam Robertstad, co-founders of Bookable Retail Group, each episode shares proven strategies for retailers on Shopify: booking flows, storefront UX, pricing, positioning, and customer experience design.

Whether you're adding appointments, hosting events, or making your in-store experience work harder, you'll get real-world playbooks that drive revenue, not just traffic.

No fluff. No theory. Just clear advice and tested frameworks from operators who build this stuff every day.
Subscribe now and start growing your store the BRG way.

Mark:

You're listening to Booked and Profitable, the podcast for experience driven brands looking to turn hosting into real growth. I'm Mark Sandino, founder, builder, and helper of brands looking to grow long before book now was a button. I help brands like yours make retail personal again with smart booking systems, better customer flows, and hosted experiences that people actually remember. Each week, we break down what works, what doesn't, and how to grow your business by not just showing up, but standing out. Because good vibes don't pay the bills.

Mark:

Great experiences will.

Mark:

All right, welcome to our podcast. We are talking about the pillar of making it bookable, and I'm here with Sam. How are you doing today, Sam?

Sam:

I'm great, Mark. How you doing?

Mark:

Good. Yeah. So you've got this one queued up in your head. What are we talking about today?

Sam:

Yeah. Well, last episode, we talked about the bookability gap. Right? The invisible friction between customer intent and their actual conversion. Today, we're drilling into that a bit further because most drop offs don't actually happen after the sale.

Sam:

Right? They happen before the click. And this isn't because the customer rejected it. It's because your booking flow was poor. So we're gonna discuss the wrong things, you know, that can kill the right customer and zoom in click by click on the right things to do and how to approach this better.

Mark:

Yeah. And let's just, like, really drive home the pain and how merchants kill themselves with this. So I'm gonna paint you a picture of what goes wrong. And as a person listening to this, and certainly me as a consumer, we'll identify with this. Let's say you're sitting at home.

Mark:

Let's go way back. You're sitting at home with, your family or you're wanting to hang out with a friend or a loved one and you're thinking, I wanna go do something fun. And I've heard about a distillery tour or a winery tour here in Woodinville, Washington, which is I don't know. It's like, I think we're at the same kinda latitude, longitude of certain parts of France, and we have, like, a really fantastic winery business here just over on the other side of the mountain or the vineyards, but over here are the places they actually make the wine and I wanna go have a winery tour. And so I start looking around and oh, this place looks fantastic.

Mark:

I look at the website, maybe it looks pretty. There's some beautiful environment shots. There's the winemaker. I definitely wanna go there. I wanna take my friends.

Mark:

Apparently, I'm learning we can do like wine and cheese and maybe some figs or a charcuterie board. And so I said, okay, I'm ready to book. I'm fully invested. I am front loaded emotionally. I'm actually pre savoring this moment to come, and I look for a way to book.

Mark:

And I see a contact us button and it kinda takes me down one cul de sac and I back up and then I use my back button. And then I I go back and say, oh, here's where it is. It's here's some information about booking. And it says, you can book today. And I don't see a big, clear juicy, so to speak, button.

Mark:

Oh, finally, I find a path forward because it's maybe buried in a page and I click on it and I'm not totally clear what next step to take because maybe there's a lot of options of some sort and I'm starting to feel frustrated and even if my intent is to do this thing, I'm getting closer and closer to the moment where I'm gonna back out of this page and say, you know what, maybe there's another winery nearby because I know this area is full of them that can help me or even worse, I'm gonna go to one of these experience aggregators that is really good at optimizing the booking flow because they are one of these platforms that put a lot of experiences in one place, but that merchant or you as a merchant are gonna end up paying like 20 or 30%. You lose control of the customer and you lose control of the entire experience. That is a extremely typical scenario that is going to create more of the kind of stalled bookings reality that we talked about in episode two. And if you haven't listened to that where we talked about, like, kind of a paint and sip kind of thing, the stalled bookings or whatever the examples were, more stalled bookings.

Mark:

So that's a good example.

Sam:

It is. I think we've all experienced that. I mean, it resonates. It's interesting how unintentionally, we often give our users more reasons to leave than to stay. Running through seven different touch points or more or getting, you know, lost in a form, complex form that's asking for your address, you know, before you've even, you know, seen the price, you know, is confusing, and we need to address that.

Mark:

Yeah. And that's something with our customers we often see them doing because we will create the framework, create the mindset, reduce friction in going from that moment of preconceived joy where they get into that pre savoring of the booking experience, what merchants or what humans tend to do is they tend to put unnecessary blockers in front. Because we don't restrict people from using the tools that are available such as forms. Well, you know what? We really wanna know, do you have any allergies?

Mark:

Oh, that's actually a pretty important one. Oh, but what's their preference? Do they want a red blanket or a blue blanket for their picnic or do they wanna do an orchard experience or a territorial picnic experience? The reality is is while you maybe need to collect that information, you need to ask yourself if the entire rest of the booking flow and actualization of that moment is in place, do you want to throw a bunch of these questions or decision making moments in front of the customer who has to say, you know what, that's a really good point. I'm gonna go ask the rest of my party and I'm gonna come back to this form later.

Mark:

I'm gonna find out if do we want the figs or do we not want the figs? And I know we're kind of beating to death this winery thing. So sometimes it's not just not putting the decisions in front of people clearly, it's putting too many decisions in front of them that creates uncertainty or a commonly used term decision fatigue.

Sam:

Yeah. Absolutely. I mean, we need to ask the question, well, why do you need all this and do you need it all now? As you said, Mark, a lot of it's important. You know, allergies is the example you use, you know, but you don't need to necessarily ask that upfront in the form.

Sam:

Think of it as every additional field that you add is going to cut into your conversion rate.

Mark:

Yeah. And anecdotally, and there's probably no real science behind this, we've always said every single field that you ask someone to fill out reduces conversion by 20%. And once again, one thing that people do not remember, the people who offer these experiences, is it's not because the person just gets mad or decides they don't wanna do it. That's not it. A lot of the times it's because they can't make the decision right then.

Mark:

They look at that form and

Mark:

they say, oh, geez, this

Mark:

is like homework. You know what? I have other stuff to do right now. I'm gonna come back and do this later. And guess what?

Mark:

A lot of the times, they never do. And so it's good to think like, hey, if I have a form that's five fields long and if it's true that every field reduces my conversion by 20%, I'm gonna reduce my conversion by 100% in aggregate. Once again, not science, but we know that it reduces conversion.

Sam:

Yeah. Friction kills momentum.

Mark:

It absolutely does. Now that is science, Sam. Thank you. Brought some real science in here. So what's next?

Mark:

I mean, what if we had to give someone some advice they could really sink their teeth into, what are we gonna ask them to do?

Sam:

Well, I think at the outset, we talked about three clicks that kill conversion. And the first we've talked through, where do I book, you know, the discovery click, the CTA needs to be ultra clear. Second, we just talked about the form. This is the commitment click, you know, the importance of minimizing the fields you're asking for. Be smart about it.

Sam:

But there's a third point here. We should talk about, Mark. It's did this actually work? What happens after I click the confirm button?

Mark:

Right. So do you think it's most helpful to talk about it from a merchant standpoint or from a consumer experience?

Sam:

Consumer experience, think is what makes sense here.

Mark:

So that the merchant needs to be asking that question with a consumer mindset, with someone who's realizing this future experience. So we can kinda come at it from both ways. If I'm using this form, is it very clear what I'm doing, what I'm getting? Are there decisions that I may have to make that are difficult to make for myself as a consumer or on behalf of people that are coming with me? Because a lot of experiential is not just me alone.

Mark:

Most of the time it's with other people and sometimes these merchants are gonna say, hey, yeah, you could buy four tickets, four bookings, four experiences to this thing. Other times, and this is true when you use tools like experiences, the experiences app, you can choose to collect information for every attendee even though those attendees aren't there at the moment of booking, they're not the ones paying. And so every single thing that we're putting in front of that purchaser is going to take them one step further to that moment where they can say, oh, we're done. This is great. Now surprisingly, often we don't know if we're done.

Mark:

We're like, wait, am I done? Now the cool thing is is when you have a prepaid experience, there's this quintessential moment where, you know, it's like, oh, I'm done. I just paid for something. We always advocate for best in class ecommerce systems integrations. We do most of our work with Shopify, and Shopify has such a common completion pattern for finishing an operation.

Mark:

It's without a doubt. And what I get is I get a confirmation email from the ecommerce store. And if you're using most booking tools that are tacked on, that are integrated nicely, you're going to get an additional confirmation of your experience to come that the ecommerce system isn't designed to send. So you can get multiple confirmations. However, there's an exception when you're doing or a free experience that doesn't require a typical e commerce checkout for a $0 amount.

Mark:

You need to make sure that the system that you're using wraps a beautiful little bow on that booking and they get something like, great, we're looking forward to seeing you, and then you get the subsequent reminders and anticipation building little emails and text messages like, hey, we're really looking forward to seeing you, which causes that dynamic we've talked about a lot of pre savoring. So the experience they have is actually heightened.

Sam:

Yeah. Absolutely. You nailed it. It's those next steps, you know, that you definitely wanna make sure are super tight. And as you said, in our payer model, the customer understands what to expect.

Sam:

They know what they've done. They've seen the confirmation clearly. They get the emails, and they start to savor and anticipate what's coming next.

Mark:

I think this would be a good time to share an example of one of our customers that does a good job of this. So this is Portobello Road Distillery. They're aptly named because they're off Portobello Road in London. They have a great story. They sell gin.

Mark:

They have a restaurant. They provide recipes. Their goal here is to sell their beverages. Right? And highlighted by their gin.

Mark:

Okay? Here is how they weave in. So if we're at their homepage here, this is their homepage. Right? It's very beautiful.

Mark:

It's exciting. I can go to this little URL or nav item called experiences here, or I can find it elsewhere on the homepage. So there's these big visual hierarchy targets. Now it's not all they do, but it's a huge part of what they do. So let's discover the Jinstitute.

Mark:

So this is a necessary step that I need to take in order to decide if I'm going to have an experience and they do a great job at it. They're setting the stage, they're giving me the necessary information, There's a necessary amount of friction here for me to get excited about this. Oh, here's what I'm gonna do. I'm gonna arrive. Oh, there's a meet and greet, and I can learn a little bit more about that.

Mark:

And as I read through this, and I'm thinking about doing this with my friends or my besties, or maybe I'm just traveling through London, I'm starting to build anticipation. I'm actually pre savoring the moment. Oh, look at this. This looks fantastic. I'd love to sniff that gin.

Mark:

Oh, wow. I get to craft my own gin, and then I get this ceremony graduation. This sounds great. I want to book this. And so I can clearly see the price, the duration, the location.

Mark:

I'm gonna go ahead and book this. I'm immediately in to well, there's quite a few choices in this case, but it's necessary choices because I've decided I wanna come on Saturday, June 21. I can see there's five spots out of 12 left at the three to 5PM and I click this and, oh, how many people do I wanna come? I want two to come. I'm buying two.

Mark:

It's very clear to me. I'm going to book this experience and this looks like a very conventional, normal process I have yet to check out, and if I click checkout, I'm gonna finish this process and it will be very, very clear to me, including the follow-up email confirmations that I have just had a successful moment of booking something that's really exciting. And the better that Portobello Road does with those confirmation and reminder emails, the more I'm gonna continue to build that anticipation and stuff we'll talk about in subsequent podcasts about how do you then take someone who's had a successful experience and turn them into salespeople through social sharing and basically free advertising in the most powerful form of advertising. So I really love Portobello Road, and we advise all our customers who are using, their combination of the retail space with the experiential to weave those things together very quickly and use a lot of the stuff we're talking about.

Sam:

Man, that's a great example. Now I wanna go check it out.

Mark:

And that's what should happen. And anyone who's listening or watching to this should be saying like, well, I'm definitely gonna go there.

Sam:

Yeah. It's pretty cool. So at this point, from a diagnostic perspective, we've given you a lot of good information. You know, we have a mini framework application that you could apply using the three f's, the flow, the fields, and feedback. So we would encourage you to walk through each of those for your business and see how you map, see how you line up.

Mark:

Yeah. Just I think it bears kinda going over those again really quick. The flow, it's like from the minute they think about you to the first click they make, eliminate everything that doesn't matter. Those fields, if you don't need the fields, if you don't need any fields other than the basic, basic, basic, get rid of them. And if you feel like you need it, cut it in half and then feedback.

Mark:

Are you and this is just good interactive design. Are you giving them the feedback they need to know that the action they took mattered and was successful? So, yeah. Is that all we have? Do we have anything else we wanna add?

Sam:

That's your homework. This week, become your own customer. You know, use your phone for the mobile experience, not just your laptop. Count every click, you know, look at your page load times and notice areas of confusion and ask yourself questions about how easy was it for you.

Mark:

You know, do you

Sam:

have confidence in making that booking? You know, would you have finished it if it wasn't your own business?

Mark:

Alright, Sam. Thanks for joining me on this podcast and I'll see you again next time.

Sam:

Sounds good, Mark. Thanks.

Mark:

That's a wrap for this episode of Booked and Profitable. If you're building experiences people actually want to book and more importantly, come back for, we're here for it. For more insights, playbooks, and growth tools, visit bookableretailgroup.com or follow us on LinkedIn. Got a story worth sharing? Then drop us a line.

Mark:

Thanks for hanging out, and we'll see you next time.