Most people love doing everything online know they have an appointment, selected their service, and its paid for. You'll get more business if you offer online payments. -Domain: $50 a year -Web developement host: $239/year for a Wix plan that comes with the ability to build a site that can book appointments and receive payments plus it's pretty user friendly and lots of youtube channels on it -Wix (and most other site developers) come with a merchant processor you can add for free (which takes out 2.9% like most CC merchant processors) But I allow people to walk in and make payments in person and have a separate merchant processor or pay cash. I do about 4K-6K per month in online sales and a pretty consistent 2K per month in walk in business beside vendor referral partners. I know for a FACT that I've won business away from other fingerprinting locations BECAUSE I allow people to pay online. Would some people still sign up and pay in person? Sure. But being able to book and pay online and not have to talk/email a human is what people want.

@Guido Hajenius correct. Sone people do prefer to walk I. With no commitment. But based on my sales, handling everything online is twice as popular

The first business I bought was a pack and ship store in 2014. At a convention for 1,100 other pack and ship businesses in 2016 a few nationwide livescan vendors were there paying $3.50 per slap $5 per roll appointment to place their kiosk in someone's pack and ship store and guide their clients that they acquire through using their machines. After taking on two vendors in 2017 I had a few people every month show up asking for inks and we'd tell them they had to go to a police station for that service. I was focused on building my 3PL fulfillment center warehouse business. In 2018 the Colorado Police departments, state-wide, announced they'd stop doing fingerprints for "civil" cases... only criminal cases. We started offering ink fingerprinting that year, but didn't really advertise it. Fast forward to 2021, our vendor partners grew to 4x vendors and revenue was about $3K per month from them for Livescan and $500 per month in walk in fingerprinting. I called Dan, balked at his prices initially, but ate up his information. At the end of 2022 I decided to go "all in" on fingerprinting and stood up a second storefront, next door, just for fingerprinting and offered bookings online for ink services. I build a balling-ass website (www.coloradospringsfingerprinting.com) and studied organic SEO, off-page SEO, and google ads. We also partnered with a livescan technology provider that allowed us to buy their machine and access to their network, but attract and sell our own livescan services such as FBI DOs, ATF .EFT, FDLE, Archiving, and Apostilles. We're approaching $7K per month for online bookings, $2,500 per month in walkins, and $6K per month in vendor referred compensated services. (we actuallydid $8500 in May online, but that was a bit of a fluke driven by $3,800 in ATF EFT services, and we'll find out the compensation from our vendors once June 15th rolls around as they had an influx of these services we services on their behalf too).

@Jennifer Olafioye what's nice in our industry is that many police stations nationwide have "discontinued" offering fingerprinting services for "non-criminal" (aka: civil)- cases. There's too much demand for this service that the police dont want to be bothered. I've tried to get my business cards and flyers posted in a few police stations for people who walkin or call their local station asking for civil-case fingerprinting with mixed results- but it was effective for me early on. My biggest competitor is only a few blocks away from the largest police station in our city and I know they refer many civil-applicants to my competitor while I'm unfortunetly a little farther away. But I work my SEO really hard and PPC campaigns.

@Freddy Benitez I do an automated email 30 minutes after each appointment and have a QR code at a table where people can sit and fill out their FD258. How do you follow up? I use wix automations, do you use any particular "reputation management" system?

@Freddy Benitez Yeah I have a QR code set up too. And I have a follow-up widget that emails them and asks for a review again set for one hour after the appointment. Since many people our nurses, teachers, and other millenial women I found success with this Mean Girls reference when displayed at our fingerprinting station.

@Annie Lin #1 through #3: it sounds like you are dealing with an inter-State background check service, which is likely reserved for one or two "state vendors" to perform livescan channeling directly for the State/Federal submission. If you are talking about an "Out of State" applicant, such as a teacher moving to a NEW state and wanting to have their fingerprints submitted via ink, then that applicant should get ALL the info they need to put on their card from their employer/licensing agency- I would just direct the applicant to DO WHAT THEIR EMPLOYER/AGENCY told them to do. The applicant likely receive all the information they need from their prospective employer... they just didn't read it. You're just doing the prints. I dont have my employees touch anything anything else on the FD258 card. 4) No, no photocopies needed. There's no point to doing that- plus it might scare off the applicant having someone have a copy of their biometrics and SSN and other data. If the card gets rejected from the mailing, then you just have to live with it and offer a free re-roll to try again.

I use wix and set up all my services as a bookable calendar service connected to my store's google calendar. wix has built in merchant processing as well which is competitive. I messed around with "bookeo" but it was a little ghetto and not customizable so it was hard to work the SEO and project professionalism. Wix is a pretty easy way to keep one's website, domain hosting, merchant processing, calendar, blog (for SEO), and integrate calendars for multiple employees.