Have we piqued your interest?
Let us prove our skills and provide you with a free video review of your eCommerce site. Schedule a meeting with our team.
How to build a scalable rental marketplace with Magento
TravelingBabY
SINCE 2019
CLIENT
Industry: Baby Products
TravelingBaby is a US company providing rental of various baby equipment for travelling families. The company owns no equipment but operates as a marketplace where customers rent tools from carefully inspected and selected vendors around the country.
WEBSITE
TEAM
Project manager, Web designer, Certified Magento developer
TRAFFIC
>5K Monthly Visits
KEY SERVICES & INTEGRATIONS
Magento development, Magento SEO/SEM Outgoing Support and Maintenance, Magento Design Magento Migration
Challenge
The specificity of the target audience imposes certain restrictions on the delivery and returning processes; Some customers want to rent the equipment right in the airport, some ask for delivery to the hotel, and others prefer the pick-up, so this had to be handled in the system.
The main obstacle we had to overcome was that Magento 1 is not suitable for the rental business model; therefore, the entire interface had to be recreated from scratch and was built custom on top of the Magento framework.
Moreover, vendors from the different parts of the country had to be integrated, linked to each vendor’s location and admin pane —this required heavy customisation of the Magento backend system.
The client had a legacy rental system written in ASP.NET. As Travellingbaby planned to expand the functional capabilities of vendors, the brand new website had to be created, and it needed to be automated completely.
Why client chose us
Our first step was to record a technical video audit of the website. We usually do this for every prospect to at least give some value to our conversation. The review covers all current website issues, reveals the areas for improvement, and shares our suggestions according to the client’s goal. The client was impressed by our approach, transparency, honesty, client testimonials and Magento skills of our team.
We posted our project to Upwork and made the selection after reviewing a few different Magento developers. Their reviews were excellent and the level of customization that I saw was encouraging. After watching a video from Paul I decided to contact them and things took off from there.
Rafi Zait
OWNER, TravelingBaby
GET A FREE WEBSITE PERFORMANCE AUDIT
Solution
The client’s development team had already done some groundwork in Magento; however, the team couldn’t handle the level of customisation needed by the client. After a detailed code review, we suggested creating the development part from scratch.
We created a Trello board for the project and distributed the tasks month by month, evaluating them in hours, determining the priority and tasks order together with the client. (We usually use this approach with our clients for fast communication and transparency.)
Client’s goal was to launch a fully automated rental booking software through Magento that specifically catered to the baby equipment rental industry and all the logistical factors that the industry comes with.
A. Super admin panel
The vendors get authorised access to the admin panel to manage all their specific products and delivery settings; everything is synchronised with the main storefront. All orders and financial information is also manageable within these sections.
We built the system so that the client can easily scale the network of vendors to run mass affiliate programs.
To achieve the client’s requirements, we had to rebuild the admin panel to provide the customer with the ability to integrate vendors from different parts of the country.
B. Checkout and rental options
The rental options are super convenient for end-users, allowing them to set pick-up and drop-off locations separately (choose the airport or hotel; or any other location on the map). These options are different for each vendor; vendors set the available options themselves in the admin panel.
In the checkout, the system calculates the price instantly according to the chosen delivery configuration. And users can also leave a comment for the delivery service.
The platform saves delivery and payment configuration for registered users to make their next purchase more convenient.
The latest version of this project has made the business more manageable and easier to work with on both sides of the industry. Mainly the customer side and the vendor side. We have what is like stores within stores, each with its own customisable traits along with a super admin panel that allows us to control everything.
Rafi Zait
OWNER, TravelingBaby
Results
- The user interface for customers and vendors is improved, increasing conversions on the site.
- The order processing system is fully automated and scalable, which has allowed the CEO to focus on expanding rather than manual work.
- The supply chain board time has been reduced up to x2.
Currently, TravellingBaby operates in 10 states of the USA, Hawaii and Puerto Rico, working with 35+ suppliers across the country. And the company’s current turnovers allow the owner to discuss new scaling strategies with us.
Ready to scale your business with us?