Questions/Clarification on Rental Functionality

We’ve used nopCommerce on several sites and been very pleased, and are now venturing into our first site with a need for rentals. As we’re finishing up configurations and starting testing, we’ve noticed several potential issues that make rentals almost non-usable, but want to confirm with this group we haven’t missed something along the way...

* Rentals aren’t returned to inventory after their assigned rental dates

* There is no “rental returned” or similar order status. This feature could 1) better track the order for customers & admins or 2) use as a trigger for adding the item back into stock

* Once an order has been submitted for rental, the item quantity is deducted from inventory immediatly, not deducted from inventory based on rental dates. Example: I submit a rental order today, with a rental date of 1 week from now. The item (original inventory of 1) is already taken out of inventory and now it shows “out of stock” for any other customers who are trying to rent the item, regardless of the dates selected.

* No calendar or schedule in the Admin panel for admins to see/manage upcoming scheduled rentals

* Product page for the customer to select rental dates doesn’t “block out” unavailable dates such as dates in the past, holidays, or days the items is already scheduled for rental.

I’m general, it appears there isn’t much functionality to handle the true operations of rentals, but rather it’s more like just adding an order note to a purchase.

I honestly would love for anyone to be able to guide us towards some plugins, modifications, or process flows that help with rentals. We’ve spent considerable time on nopCommerce stores both in the past and now setting up this new store, but may have to look elsewhere if we can’t resolve some of these issues since this new client is entirely rental-based.

This community has always been great at helpful feedback in the past and I hope there is something we’re just not doing correctly!

As you have said, at the moment it is only a system that will allow the entry and payment for a rental order. It is not currently a system for management of the rental items, their status and location etc. This needs to be managed externally. Or you need to customise the solution to do all the things listed below:

Note: You probably want to have stock control turned off so you can take multiple orders for the same item, alternatively allow out of stock orders. But if you only have one and it is rented for a period, then you want to block someone else renting the same item at the same time which is not possible out of the box.

pillbug22 wrote:
As above of if you are using stock control to keep track of an item then you need to manually adjust the inventory when it is available again
pillbug22 wrote: – Yes you could do that
pillbug22 wrote: – Yes you could do that
pillbug22 wrote: – Yes you could add that – I am working on plugin with that type of calendar display functionality now
pillbug22 wrote: – Yes you could do that
pillbug22 wrote:
Some of the items have been noted in work items but I am not sure if they will get implemented. See https://github.com/nopSolutions/nopCommerce/issues/36

You would also want some customised management display and reporting pages.

There is quite a bit of customisation required to make a proper rental management system as detailed above but it is possible. We are developing an accommodation reservation system plugin at the moment which has some very similar functionality to the above requirements.

Thanks for the feedback;

I had seen the ability to mark a product as rental since we’ve been using nop, so I just jumped to conclusions we could use nop for a true rental system once we had a need.

We won’t be abandoning nop by any means, but just won’t work for our requirements on this particular site.

See https://www.nopcommerce.com/boards/topic/74028/rental-bookings-system