You can make life easier by choosing which rental periods you allow customers to select for bookings made on the online store.
On your website, customers can easily click to open up the interactive date picker to choose their desired date, time, and store location choose from all available stock for those rental periods.
How it works
You can set up your rental period settings to display the date picker in three different ways:
Any date and time. Customers can choose any date and time within your operating hours for the longest or shortest duration they wish.
Fixed durations. Customers can choose from predefined durations; like one day, two day, three day rental etc.
Fixed time slots. Customers can select from predefined time-slots; like 9am-12pm, 1pm-6pm etc.
Go to Settings > Rental period to get started setting up your allowed rental periods.
💡Note: You may first like to set up your operating hours before the completing the tutorial below. This allows you restrict the pickup and return of orders to your business opening hours.
1. Dates and times
This option allows your customers to choose any dates and times (within your operating hours) to pick up and return their items.
1. In Settings > Rental Periods, choose Dates and times.
2. Enable/Disable time selection. If you choose to disable the time selection option, your customers are only allowed to place in their dates.
With time selection disabled, orders will come in at the times you set up as your Default order times.
2. Fixed durations
This option allows your customers to choose from predefined order durations to pick up and return their items; such as 1 hour, 1 day, 1 week, or 1 month.
1. In Settings > Rental Periods, choose Fixed durations.
2. Enable/Disable time selection. Similar to the first option, you can disable time selection altogether.
With time selection disabled, orders will come in at the times you set up as your Default order times.
💡Note: For rentals shorter than 24 hours, the customer can only select a pickup time; the return time is set automatically.
If fixed durations conflict with your operating hours, some periods are unavailable.
3. Fixed time slots
This option allows your customers to choose from predefined time-slots within one day.
For example, between 09:00 and 10:00, between 13:00 and 15:00, and between 19:00 and 21:00 etc.
💡Note: When using fixed time slots, you will not need need to set up operating hours. To prevent future conflicts, it's best to disable operating hours altogether.
Best practices
1. Apply rental periods to manual orders
Select this setting if you want the selectable rental period settings you chose in the previous step to be applied to manual orders you and your team place in the backend.
In Settings > Rental Periods, click Apply to manual orders.
Leaving this setting disabled gives you full control of manual orders' rental periods.
If you enable this setting, you will have the option to override the restriction if needed when creating your manual order.
2. Choose how the time picker increments
Reduce the number of choices available on the time picker by setting the interval to 15 minutes, 30 minutes, or 1 hour.
In Settings > Rental Periods, click Time picker increments.
3. Prevent last-minute reservations
If you need some time before customers come to pick up their items, you can set a minimum notice for reservations.
In Settings > Online reservations > Preferences, click Last minute reservations.
You're all set!
You have now successfully learnt how to set up the rental periods your customers can choose from in Booqable.