Will this work for equipment rentals?

I’ve installed the free version and gone through the setup steps and still unsure whether this will work for my potential business model/needs – but I’m beginning to think this won’t do what I want, even if I paid for it.

First Issue: I can’t seem to find a way to set rentals for DAILY. I’ve messed around with the hourly stuff trying to force full-day rentals but it’s still displaying times and allowing for half-day or less rental periods.

Second Issue: There is a “Delivery” option, but no way that I can find to simply set a “time window” for delivery or pickup. All of my potential rentals will be delivered and picked up by myself or employees, so I don’t want the customer to think they can come to pick up a piece of equipment – they can’t.

Third Issue: The pricing tools seem to be geared toward hourly rentals. I can’t figure out how to set even a daily price, let alone a price for a period of days. I want to have 2-day rentals for those folks who really don’t need to rent for a week so that I can get my equipment cycled back for the next rental faster when that situation exists. I also want to provide a different rate for that shorter rental period, but that equipment also has to be capable of being rented for a longer period (7-day rentals)… It’s too expensive to have equipment sit idle and unavailable after the shorter rental and the only way I can figure to have these two rental periods for the same piece of equipment is by having two listings for that same piece of equipment each with 2 different minimum rental periods. The obvious issue with this method of addressing the different rate issue is the double listing scenario where two people could rent that same piece of equipment for days that overlap since they are in effect two different pieces of equipment within the system.

Fourth Issue: I also need to have a 1-day turn-around time from pickup/end of the rental period for equipment, because some of it will need to be serviced before it can be rented again. I understand the pickups on dropoffs concept, but if anything I need the opposite… I need to have a default 1-day service gap and be able to manually return the equipment to available status if that service gets done early. ie; trailer gets picked up today (Monday) at the end of the contract and the service is complete within an hour after pickup – I need to be able to make that trailer available for rental immediately afterward, not keep it unavailable until the 1-day turnaround expires for it to be available next for a Wednesday or later rental.

• This reply was modified 3 years, 9 months ago by obewanz.
• This reply was modified 3 years, 9 months ago by obewanz.
• This reply was modified 3 years, 9 months ago by obewanz.

Hi,

Thanks for the detailed requests. We would like to clarify that the default label for “Pickup” actually stands for the “beginning of the rental”, while “Drop Off” indicates the return date and time, the “end of the rental”.

Such labels could be easily overridden through the default GetText functionalities of WordPress, we also suggest using a specific plugin to make such overrides if needed (in the Knowledge Base page of our website, under the Customization Tips section).
That said, these two parameters are mandatory for the system in order to allow the booking process. Every rental order needs to have a start and end date-time, and by calculating the exact duration of the rental in seconds, the system will apply the corresponding rental costs defined in the page Fares Table of the wp-admin section of the plugin.

I’m going to add a note to each of your last issues:

1. The page Fares Table will let you define daily rates, hourly rates and extra-hours rates. Where the daily rates will give the exact rental cost for any number of days of rent requested, the hourly rates will do the same, but for orders shorter than 24 hours, and the extra-hours rates will be used to adjust the final rental cost in case of a duration greater than 24 hours, but not even, like 2 days and 3 hours could be charged as the cost for 2 days plus the cost defined for 3 extra hours, or as 3 days if there are no fares defined for the 3 extra hours like in my example.
We invite you to visit the official demo website of VikRentItems where you can access the wp-admin section and see how we configured the rental costs for the various rental items in the page Fares Table.

2. The delivery window will be determined by the “pick up date and time” selected by the guests, where the “pick up date and time” would actually mean the date and time when the guests would like to have the equipment delivered. As we stated above, that’s actually the start/begin date-time of the rental order.

3. VikRentItems can support any kind of duration for the rentals, hourly, daily, weekly, monthly or even yearly. You can declare the exact rental costs from a minimum duration of 1 hour to a maximum duration of 365 days.

4. There’s a configuration setting called “Dropped off item will be available after X hours”. However, this will be applied globally, not at item level. Also, here again the “dropped off item” means the returned item, the end date and time of the rental period.

We are not sure if VikRentItems could work for your project, but maybe some settings need to be defined according to your specific needs from the wp-admin section. Of course, the free version you are currently using is more than sufficient to set up the system and to understand whether this will actually work for your project. There’s no need to purchase the Pro version at this early step.

We invite you to get in touch with our team directly from our website for any other specific questions. Maybe we can link some test items on our demo website for you to see a similar configuration to what you actually need. We could not do that on this forum, and so you can always reach out to our team by visiting our website. Thank you.

The VikWP Team