Case study 03 — Coaching practice
Paul David
A coach with four services to sell and no cart to sell them in. Turn coaching hours into enquiries, connect students to equipment without making him a retailer, and leave the whole thing in his hands.
The work is live — judge it there
What is being sold
Four services, each with its own booking path.
| Service | Duration | Price | Who it is for |
|---|---|---|---|
| In-Home Coaching | 60 min | $150 | One-on-one coaching at your location focused on technique, footwork, consistency, strategy and personalised skill development. |
| Private Lessons | 60 min | $150 | Personalised private coaching focused on individual goals, for beginner, intermediate or competitive players. |
| Group Lessons | 60 min | $120 | Structured group coaching for players who want to train together while improving technique and movement. |
| Camp Clinic | Full day | $250 | Intensive day-based training with drills, coaching, match play and skill-building activities. |
Travel fees are stated on the page rather than raised after someone has committed.
01
The booking path
Five steps, no form,no checkout.
The whole problem is the distance between wanting a lesson and the coach knowing about it.
01
Lands on the site
From a search, a flyer or another player’s recommendation.
02
Opens Services
Four offers, each with duration and price stated.
03
Picks one
The choice is made before any contact happens.
04
Book now
Opens an email already addressed, with that service as the subject.
05
Paul’s inbox
A coach who checks his email checks his bookings.
A contact form would add two steps, a plugin to maintain, and a place for enquiries to go missing. The email opens already knowing which service was chosen.
02
The equipment path
Answering thequestion every coachgets asked.
A coach who says ‘buy whatever’ loses authority. A coach who runs a shop loses time. This is the third option.
01
“What racket should I buy?”
Every coach is asked this, constantly.
02
Recommended Equipment
One page, three setups, tiered by level.
03
Starter / Intermediate / Advanced
GEWO CS Energy Control, CS Energy Carbon Pro, Xolo Offensive with Neoflexx.
04
Code PDCGEWO
12% off, so the recommendation is worth acting on.
05
GEWO USA
A properly stocked store — and another client of mine.
The student gets a specific answer and a reason to act. The coach carries no stock, no shipping, no returns. Two of my clients worth more to each other than alone.
Design decisions
Five choices, and why
01A coaching business is not a shop
Paul David sells time: in-home coaching, private lessons, group lessons and camp clinics.
None of that belongs in a cart. He is paid at the table, so a checkout adds a step his business does not have. Which makes the question a different one: how do you get someone from ‘I want lessons’ to a message in his inbox, in as few steps as possible?
02Four services, priced in the open
Name, duration, price and who it is for, with travel fees noted. Coaches routinely hide pricing and lose the enquiry to the uncertainty, because the visitor assumes it is expensive.
Publishing it filters out the people who were never going to book and gives everyone else a reason to act now.
03One booking action per service
Each service has its own Book now button opening a pre-addressed email, with the service already in the subject line.
No form to build or maintain, no submissions lost in a plugin, and no ambiguity at Paul’s end about which service the enquiry is for.
04The equipment page, which is really a partner path
Rather than run a shop himself, Paul has a Recommended Equipment page naming three GEWO setups by level, blade and rubber specified.
Each links to GEWO USA, a properly stocked store I had already worked on, and carries his own code, PDCGEWO, for 12% off. The student gets a straight answer and a discount; the coach gets a credible recommendation and zero inventory.
05Built to be handed over
The unglamorous half: services Paul can edit himself, payment matched to how he actually gets paid, domain connected, ownership transferred.
A site the client cannot change goes stale within a year.
What I am not claiming
No booking or revenue figures are published for this project, so none appear here. What it shows is that the same thinking works away from ecommerce: understand how the business actually takes money, then build the shortest honest path to it — and notice where two clients can be worth more to each other than either is alone. The site is live; judge the execution there.
Back to the flagship — 01
Table Tennis USA
Contact
Coach, club or academy?
You do not need a shop. You need the shortest possible path between someone deciding to train and you hearing about it.