Case study 03 — Coaching practice
PaulDavid
A table tennis coach with four services to sell and no cart to sell them in. The job was to turn coaching hours into a site that produces enquiries, connect his 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 may apply depending on location — stated on the page rather than raised after someone has already committed.
01
The booking path
Five steps, no form,no checkout.
The entire design problem for a coaching site is the distance between wanting a lesson and the coach knowing about it. Every step that can be removed, is.
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 conventional contact form would add two steps — fill in fields, wait for a confirmation — plus 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 matched to their level and a reason to act on it. The coach carries no stock, no shipping and no returns. Two of my clients end up worth more to each other than either was alone.
Design decisions
Five choices and the reasoning behind them
01A coaching business is not a shop
Paul David coaches table tennis. What he sells is time: in-home coaching, private lessons, group lessons and camp clinics — an hour or a day, at a stated price, with travel affecting some bookings.
None of that belongs in a cart. Paul is paid in person, so a checkout would have added a step that does not exist in his business and would have to be maintained forever. The site was built with no online payments, which made the design question a different one entirely: 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
Each service carries its name, its duration, its price and a plain description of who it is for, with travel fees noted where they apply. Coaches routinely hide pricing and lose the enquiry to the uncertainty — the visitor assumes it is expensive, or assumes asking commits them to something.
Publishing it does two jobs: it filters out the people who were never going to book, and it gives everyone else a reason to act now rather than ‘think about it’.
03One booking action per service
Every service has its own Book now button, and each one opens a pre-addressed email rather than dropping the visitor into a generic contact page. The service they picked is already the subject of the message.
No form to build, no form to maintain, no submissions disappearing into a plugin — and no ambiguity on Paul’s end about which service the enquiry is for.
04The equipment page, which is really a partner path
Rather than build a shop Paul would have to run, the site carries a Recommended Equipment page with three setups tiered by level: the GEWO CS Energy Control for youth starting out, the CS Energy Carbon Pro for adults and kids wanting more speed, and the Xolo Offensive combo with Neoflexx rubber for players serious about developing their game.
Each links through to GEWO USA — a properly stocked store I had already worked on — and carries a coach-specific 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 of the project: services structured so Paul can edit them himself, payment configured to match how he actually gets paid, the domain connected, and ownership transferred to him at the end.
A site the client cannot change is a site that goes stale within a year and quietly stops representing the business.
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 applies 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.