The booking page address looks like book.beesection.com/marina-nails. It seems a small thing. But this address is dictated over the phone, printed on business cards and put into profile bios, so there are more decisions around it than it looks.
Why a person chooses it
We could build the address from the company name automatically. The problem is the second "Marina": her address would become marina-2, and that is awkward to dictate to clients. So the field is in the sign-up form, and a person fills it in. An empty field is not an error: the address is then built by us, but it is better not to rely on that.
Format rules
Lowercase Latin letters, digits and hyphens. 3 to 40 characters. No hyphen at the start or the end. Cyrillic is not allowed: a Cyrillic address in a messenger turns into a string of percent signs and codes, and it is impossible to copy from a business card.
Reserved words
Some words are taken forever, 37 of them: api, app, login, admin, support, blog, book, review, waitlist, beesection and others. Two reasons.
The first is technical: booking pages live on the same domain as the service pages. A salon at review would take the review page away from everyone, and a salon at waitlist the waiting list page. Every new service route adds a word to this list, and there is a test for it.
The second is about trust: a salon at support would look like our support page, and a client might leave data there thinking they are writing to us.
Automatic address generation skips these words too: a company called "Support" gets support-2.
Checking while typing
While you type, the form asks the server whether the address is free. The request goes out 400 milliseconds after the last keystroke and only when the format is already valid, so the server does not get a request per letter.
The answer is only "yes" or "no" with a reason: taken, reserved, wrong format.
Why we do not suggest free alternatives
It would be convenient: you type marina, it is taken, and we offer marina-nails-kyiv. We deliberately do not.
A service that answers "taken" or "free" to every request already reveals something. But a service that also suggests alternatives makes it possible to enumerate every taken address, that is, every salon in the system with its name. That is other people's data, and it cannot be given away for the convenience of a form.
So the answer is minimal, and you come up with the alternative yourself. Adding a city or a specialty is usually enough.
Why the address cannot be changed
The address field exists only in the sign-up form. It is not in the company settings, and that is not an oversight.
The address gets dictated, printed and put into profiles. If it could be changed, the old one would have to either become free, and then every link you handed out would lead nowhere, or redirect to the new one forever, and then a freed address would never really be free. Both are worse than one rule: the address is chosen once.
That is why the sign-up form checks the address while you type rather than afterwards, and why we suggest spending a minute on it before pressing "Sign up".
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