How we built Agende Sessão: website, booking and payments for appointment-based professionals
Agende Sessão is one of our products, built for the Brazilian market: it gives people who work by appointment their own website, online booking and payment by Pix or card, all in one place. It grew out of a website we built for a psychoanalyst, and here I explain the decisions behind it. (The product and the links below are in Portuguese.)
The problem
Psychologists, nutritionists, personal trainers, private tutors, beauticians: people who make a living from appointments usually juggle three or four tools. An Instagram profile, a calendar in some app, payment arranged over WhatsApp and confirmations done by hand. Every extra step is a client who gives up halfway.
The idea was to bring it all together on a single page: the client gets to know the professional, picks a time, pays and gets the confirmation by email, without any back-and-forth messages.
Decision 1: the money never goes through us
Many platforms collect the payment and pass it on later. We chose the opposite: the payment goes straight to the professional's account, either through Pix, Brazil's instant payment system, to their own key (with a QR code that already carries the amount) or through their own account with a payment provider. Refunds and disputes stay with whoever received the money, and the platform doesn't hold anyone's funds. We explain how charging by Pix works in how to charge by Pix and issue receipts.
Decision 2: security before features
- Professionals log in with two-step verification through an authenticator app.
- The browser never touches the database: everything goes through the server, always filtered by professional, with automated tests that try to read another account's data and must fail.
- Each professional's payment and calendar keys are stored encrypted, and card data never passes through our server.
- From the client, only the minimum: name, email, phone and time slot, automatically deleted after a set period.
Decision 3: our own calendar, connected to Google
Instead of depending on a third-party scheduling service, we built the calendar into the product. Anyone who uses Google Calendar can connect their account: busy times there disappear from the page, and each confirmed appointment becomes an event, with a Google Meet link when it's online. Email reminders go out automatically before each appointment, which helps reduce no-shows.
Decision 4: a website that loads fast and shows up on Google
Each professional gets their own address, with ready-made copy for their field that can be changed, frequently asked questions and structured data for Google. It's the same care we put into the custom websites we build, explained in why a website doesn't show up on Google.
See it working
There is a sample page with a fictional professional, where you can see the website and the calendar as a client sees them. For anyone who wants to understand what changes with online booking, the product blog has a guide to online booking for appointment-based professionals.
If you need something similar custom-built for your business, with booking, payments or a client area, get in touch.