Which rental plugin suits a business model without fixed return dates?

Shopify Apps
1

Hello! We’re looking for a rental plugin that can suit our business model:

  • Customers decide when they’d like to return the product, so we don’t know the return date and can’t charge for the entire rental up front.
  • Customers pay for their first month at checkout, but many people rent weeks or months in advance. The recurring rental charges should only begin one month after the product is actually delivered, not when they checkout.
  • The first month’s bill is slightly larger than the remaining months’ bills because it incorporates delivery costs.
  • We are test-driving rentals for travelers and national rentals, which have different pricing and delivery schemes. Travelers will have their gear delivered to their hotels and are charged on a daily basis, while national rentals’ delivery fees will be based on their zip code and size of the products they’re renting. Also, not all of our products can be rented nationally due to size.
  • Some of our products are one-time purchases that accompany products we rent.
  • We’re launching a members service that allows customers to swap products and pay a discounted rental rate.

We’re not big fans of Booqable and IzyRent because they require end dates for the rentals, which users won’t know when they rent from us. What are some plugins that we’ve been missing?

2

We have thousands of merchants doing product rentals using our booking app BookThatApp. The App has the ability to extend a booking, but it is a manual process. Although you could potentially create a form that customers can use to extend the booking and then use our API to make the adjustment automatically.

Customers decide when they’d like to return the product, so we don’t know the return date and can’t charge for the entire rental up front.

One thing I wonder about this scenario is how do you account for availability for other customers.

E.g. You have 1 item available to rent. Customer 1 rents it starting April 1 for a month. Now customer 2 comes along and tries to book the item for June 1. Should it be available? How can you allow the booking for customer 2 if customer 1 potentially still wants the item through to July? If you do allow customer 2 to rent it then what happens when customer 1 goes to extend the rental period? If you don’t allow the booking and customer 1 returns the item in June then you are leaving money on the table.