After reading the documentation and briefly experimenting with the rental product functionality that is currently built in to nopCommerce, I'd like to open up a discussion and potential feature request to extend the default settings and availability.
Currently you can set a product to be a "rentable" item and assign it one of three options "Days/Weeks/Months?". Great start. However, often times businesses have products that are available to rent that fall into all three categories.
For example:
Bob's Rental Shop
- Rent's out several items (Jackhammer model A, Jackhammer model B, Auger model C, Auger model D)
-- Jackhammer model A : current inventory qty: 2
--- Jackhammer model A rents for 5$ a day, 15$ a week, or 30$ a month.
-- Jackhammer model B : current inventory qty: 1
--- Jackhammer model B rents for 7$ a day, 21$ a week, or 42$ a month.
etc.
If we were to employ this sort of setup at the moment, my understanding is that we would need a total of 6 products entered into nopCommerce (3 Jackhammer model A's, 1x. designated as a day rental, 1x. designated as weekly rental, and 1x. designated as monthly rental - each of which would have an inventory qty of 2).
Could we instead add the possibility of creating a product and then adding versus selecting the "Unit of Rental". Thus associated 1-many rental options for a single product?
This way when someone is looking to rent Jackhammer model A, they can select either based on a calendar view and the total would be calculated, or they could manually select the "unit of rental" and be limited in the calendar view for their selection.
Another issue crops up as to the actual availability of the item which gets into a grey area that might be better left unexplored by nopCommerce - because renters do not always return items when they should, so relying on current "reserved/rented" dates to provide feedback on actual availability may not be accurate.
I can see this same feature being applied to car rentals, room rentals, etc.
