Is it possible to create an equipment hire/rental process using Square Appointments?

[Lindi_TPAO]

The title of this thread has been edited from the original: Is it possible to create an equipment hire/rental process using Square commerce/appointments?

Hi community,

I have a client that would like to rent/hire equipment to customers for short periods of time (2 hours), similar to how someone would rent a sun lounger at the beach.

If I were to create a website for this, would it be possible to fulfil the equipment rental process through Appointments? My concern is that people would be renting equipment at the same time as each other, which means multiple 'appointment' slots featuring in the calendar at the same time/date. For example, three customers each rent one piece of equipment for 2 hours at 5pm on a Friday, that would be three appointments at the same time for the same duration.

I had thought that each piece of equipment was a 'staff member' as a workaround… but that feels like the wrong way to go about it.

Any support is welcome with this question!!
Thanks,
Mark 

[Katie_SQ · Accepted solution]

Hey @Lindi_TPAO, 

Welcome to the Community! We love seeing new faces here, so thanks for joining. 🙂

You're on the right track with your thinking. While Square Appointments isn't specifically designed for equipment rentals, there are a few ways you could make it work for your client.

Here are some options to consider:

1. Equipment as 'Staff Members': As you mentioned, one workaround is to set up each piece of equipment as a staff member in Square Appointments. This allows you to manage the availability of each item individually and facilitate multiple bookings simultaneously. Although it might seem unconventional, it can effectively track and manage rentals. Keep in mind that each staff member profile requires a unique email address or phone number.
   
   

   • Staff Member: "Long Table Hire 1" - Availability: M-F 9-5pm
   • Staff Member: "Long Table Hire 2" - Availability: M-F 9-5pm
   • Staff Member: "Long Table Hire 3" - Availability: M-F 9-5pm
   • Staff Member: "Short Table Hire 1" - Availability: M-F 9-5pm
   • Staff Member: "Short Table Hire 2" - Availability: M-F 9-5pm
   • Staff Member: "Short Table Hire 3" - Availability: M-F 9-5pm
     • For each piece of equipment, whether unique or duplicate, you'll need a separate 'staff member' profile. You’ll want to make sure each 'staff member' is clearly named as the piece of equipment to avoid confusion. Depending on the amount of equipment, this option could become complex.
       
       
       

2. Class Bookings: If you'd rather not use the 'staff member' workaround, you could consider using the Class Bookings feature in Square Appointments. This feature allows you to create sessions where multiple customers can book the same time slot. You can set up a 'class' for each time slot and specify the maximum number of participants (i.e., renters) based on available equipment. This feature is available with a Square Appointments Plus or Premium subscription.
   
   

   • Class: "Long Table Hire" - Class time: Monday 9am-11am
   • Class: "Long Table Hire" - Class time: Monday 11am-1pm
   • Class: "Long Table Hire" - Class time: Monday 1pm-3pm
   • Class: "Short Table Hire" - Class time: Monday 9am-11am
   • Class: "Short Table Hire" - Class time: Monday 11am-1pm
   • Class: "Short Table Hire" - Class time: Monday 1pm-3pm
     • For each time slot and type of equipment, you'll need a new class. If you have duplicates, like 10 identical tables, create one class with 10 spots and replicate it for each time slot.

Each option has its pros and cons, so the best choice depends on your client’s needs and how they want to manage the booking process.

I hope this helps! Please reach out if you have any other questions. 😊

[ecoutdoors]

I own a business that does both retail and rentals. I've also been trying to figure out a way to do use Square Appointments for rentals. I currently use Square for retail and Booqable rentals. Booqable does have a Square integration but I find that the integration doesn't work very well and causes confusion for customers on my website. So I use a separate Booqable website which is linked on my Square website. I generally like the functionality of Booqable but my biggest complaint is that online rentals are paid for through Booqable, not Square, so my square gift cards and discounts don't work with it. Booqable also doesn't have an in person POS system so I need to process walk-in rentals separately. It has created a big mess for bookkeeping and is not the best experience for my customers. 

I've been trying to make Square Appointments work for my rentals. It would honestly solve so many issues. I followed the same format that @Katie_SQ laid out but ran into a couple of issues:

1.  I have about 25 different rental items, meaning I'd need to create 25 different staff profiles for each item. Each staff profile requires a unique email address. I started to create free google email addresses for each staff profile. But Google requires a phone number to create a new email address and only allows you to use a phone number for 4 different email addresses. There's no way that I'd be able to create enough email addresses to build out my rental site. 

2.  The Appointments online page isn't super customizable so my customers will still be reading "staff" when I mean "rental items" and "appointment" when I mean "rental" which I'm afraid would cause a lot of confusion.

3.  Customers can't see how many items are available for a single time slot. For example, if I had a customer who wanted to rent 8 river tubes for Saturday at 10am, they would have to go through A LOT of work only to find out that we only have 7 available that day. 

So this is me putting out to the internet universe for any Square developers who might find it--using Square Appointments as it currently is designed is not a good option for equipment rentals. But it feels like we're so close. I hope that Square might consider investing development resources into Square Appointments or another Square-owned product to make equipment rentals possible so I can finally fully integrate my sales and rentals. 

[Katie_SQ]

Thanks for sharing your experience, @ecoutdoors. I'm sorry to hear that the current workarounds haven't met your needs.

Enhancing Square Appointments to better support rental businesses is on our Product team's radar, though we don't have any updates to share on this at the moment.

In the meantime, I suggest exploring the Square App Marketplace for other solutions that might integrate more smoothly with Square and meet your requirements.

Sorry I couldn't be of more help here. If you have any other questions, please let us know!