The first thing is first. You need a reliable website for your rental business because over 90% of customers find new products and services online, and 75% of all customers judge your business’s credibility by looking at your website. And so many other reasons and statistical data support the importance of having a website for your rental business.
How to build one?
Traditionally, people build websites from scratch using their coding and web development skills. Times have changed since then. Now, it has gotten so much easier with the development of Rental Software solutions, which helps you to build a website quickly using drag and drop style and activating ready templates and features. One of the popular rental software in the market is Reservety.
This article compares traditional web-building to using Reservety so you can choose the best route.
Reservety brings more value to your website.
To explain that, we described the fees and benefits associated with developing the website. Let’s look at them one by one:
Hosting
You need reliable hosting to store all your business files and website database. There are cloud-based and traditional hosting options; we recommend cloud hosting to ensure better scalability and performance. Cloud servers are faster and have minimal outages because they are connected to multiple servers. If one fails, the workload automatically moves to the other, avoiding downtimes in your business. This is how Reservety’s hosting works.
The price of cloud hosting ranges between $10 and $30 per month, depending on the provider and the size of your business. The hosting provider may charge you more if you have thousands of items on your website, serving big traffic.
Reservety does not have that type of limitation now; it gives unlimited bandwidth to list unlimited inventories on your website—also, Reservety’s price start at only $28. In addition to hosting, you are getting over 200+ features and tools. Isn’t it reasonable to get Reservety for $28/month instead of just paying $20-$30/per month for bare hosting? We leave the choice to you!
Domain Name
Both options require a domain name. One advantage of Reservety is that it makes linking your new and existing domains to your new website easier. If you find it hard to do it, Reservety appoints a specialist to do it. Domain names usually cost between $10-$20 per year. So, as far as pricing is concerned, both options tie into this category.
Web design
Web design is important for the success of your website. Poorly designed websites send a negative signal about your business. Put yourself in customers’ shoes. Would you want to do business with someone whose website is sluggish and filled with errors? Probably, not.
According to a study, 94% of the negative website feedback was received due to poor design. It means people care about the design of your website. If you do not have enough web-building knowledge, it is important to leave it to professionals. Unfortunately, web-design services cost hundreds of dollars, if not thousands. Luckily, when you use Reservety, you get free web design assistance, drag-and-drop style web-design tools, and many ready templates. But, if you need a dedicated design (or want to turn your sketches into actual website design), Reservety offers a Colibri add-on with one-time affordable pricing.
Considering all the tools and features you get, Reservety is a better and more affordable option than trying to build your website on your own or with the help of web development companies. Firstly, your web-design mistakes cost your company a poor reputation. Secondly, external companies charge high for their services and do not take responsibility for updating the templates, whereas Reservety ensures that your website is compatible with updates.
Booking System
A booking system is vital for Rental Businesses because people nowadays prefer to book rental items online. For example, 70% of all bookings have been made online in recent years. If you want to add that feature to your website, you must either buy a plugin or develop one from scratch, both of which are costly and time-consuming. On the other hand, Reservety offers an automated booking system, making the installation and management process easy and free.
When you sign up for reservety, you get a fully functional booking system that you can set up based on your preference. For instance, you can change the rates, offer different rental intervals (e.g., hourly, daily, weekly, monthly, etc.), and charge late fees for late returns. Concisely, Reservety handles all the booking-related tasks singlehandedly without requiring to get third-party plugins.
Scheduling & Inventory Management
Rental businesses must have a scheduling and inventory management system to track item usage, availability, and performance. Specifically speaking, you need to schedule each order to avoid double bookings, and you should track the status of your inventories. When you build your website on your own, you may need to get a third-party scheduling tool or rely on external scheduling software; the most inconvenient part is managing them manually. It is not only costly but also a complex process, which may require paid administrative assistance.
When you use Reservety, everything is automated, and you can save yourself from additional expenses and headaches. Reservety becomes your rental business companion that will replace paid staff and improve productivity.
Here is how Reservety’s Scheduling and Inventory Management system works:
- Allows you to add all your inventories to a digital warehouse with serial numbers;
- Synchs all the labeled items with the booking system so every time someone rents an item or returns it, the scheduling system automatically updates the central calendar;
- It has an availability calendar that updates based on the bookings in real-time. It displays the availability of items per calendar date and hour. If something is already booked out, the calendar system blocks further orders to avoid double bookings;
- Tracks rental periods and automatically charge late fees if items are returned later than the deadline.
- Convenient reports on inventories. With Reservety, you can instantly get reports about your inventory and see the best-performing products so you can make thoughtful decisions while replenishing your inventory.
- Easy to price, describe, and modify the inventories. You can write precise SEO-targeted descriptions for your products, set prices with variations (e.g., sizes, colors, brands, etc.), and switch on and off the items from the rental website with a single click.
Reservety’s scheduling and inventory management system handles more tasks to give you the utmost convenience and accuracy in rental business management.
Website Maintenance
You need to remember that creating a website is not the end. You still need to update your website regularly to make it compatible with system changes to ensure the stability of your website. For example, if a system discontinues certain features or plugins for security reasons, your website will not function properly. In those cases, you either need to get it fixed spending lots of money to hire an experienced webmaster to manage that type of activity on your website. You can avoid such hassles and costs with Reservety because it appoints one account manager per client, so they help notify you with updates and help you to maintain the good health of your website and servers at all times.
Search Engine Optimization
SEO is very important for the success of your rental website. If your website does not appear in search results, your chances are slashed big time. To remedy that, you must optimize your website for search engine crawlers so they can rank your pages and keywords higher.
If you are building your website, you must have coding knowledge to properly add tags, keywords, meta titles, and descriptions. But you can avoid the coding with Reservety as it makes the process super easy by implementing simple input fields to add meta tags and descriptions for optimal performance. Also, Reservety removes the necessity for hiring external SEO agencies, avoiding additional expenses.
Marketing
Marketing is important to grow your completed website and overall business because you will need marketing to stay visible among other rental businesses. You should be active on social media, create incentives with coupons and discounts, add your business to Google Maps and business directories, and more. Overall, marketing is a huge task and consumes a lot of your time if you try to do it manually. To give the freedom and enough time to focus on other things, Reservety implemented numerous marketing tools to simplify the process. Here is how Reservety helps you to grow your website:
- Makes it easier to share your products on social media through share buttons;
- Links all your social media pages with your website so everything you post on your webpage can get shared on social media automatically;
- Lets you create attractive marketing templates and send them to potential customers through Bulk SMS and Email campaigns;
- Allows you to create discounts and coupons that can be redeemed on the booking processes;
- Implements a super convenient quoting system that your customers can check the prices without having to contact you;
- Live chat system to serve customers in real-time. Young people hate phone calls and emailing. Instead, they prefer to receive customer support through a live chat;
That is not a complete list. Reservety can implement many other marketing tools and even work with you on a one-to-one basis to create marketing features that will suit your business. Reservety is boundaryless software that can help your website to expand to new heights.
Order and Customer Management
A rental website should do more than display simple information. It should be an interactive platform where customer can register their accounts, check the status of their orders, view contracts and invoices, and update their shipping and billing details independently. Anyone can build a website with membership functionality, but making it more appealing to a rental business, will be challenging as it would require significant modifications and coding knowledge.
Reservety, on the other hand, has already implemented convenient order and customer management features in its software. That means those functions will be available when you set up a new website with Reservety.
More specifically, with Reservety, you will get the following features on your website:
- Order Management System that will be visible to you on the dashboard, where you can view bookings, customer information, received payments, signed contracts, and more. Also, the order management system will allow you to change or modify order details and customer information, approve or cancel bookings, extend or shorten rental periods, add/remove fees to accounts, send payment requests with automated invoices, and more.
- Customer management. This feature is available for users and admins. Users can log in to their accounts and view their personal information, transactions, order statuses, received points, automatically distributed discount coupons, and more. Admins can manage their users at the backend, add or remove bonuses and fees to accounts, send direct messages and invoices to individual customers, etc.
Other Rental Features
A rental website should have multiple features to give the best rental experience to users. Namely some of those features include:
- SSL Security to make your website safe and secure for customers
- Mobile optimization to make your website accessible from PCs and all mobile devices.
- Bundling features let customers rent multiple items in one go at a better price.
- Contracts and Waivers with digital signatures to avoid liability issues and make your customers responsible for damages.
- Upselling and Cross-selling features to increase your rental revenues
- Easy integrations with Google Maps, Analytical tools, and accounting platforms (e.g., QuickBooks, Xero, etc.)
- Payment gateway integrations to receive payments from Visa, MasterCard, Authorize.net, PayPal, Square, Stripe, and others to streamline payments.
Those are just some of the features Reservety implements in your new website. Think of how much work would be involved to add all these features while building your website. Isn’t it depressing even think about it? We have been in the rental industry for a long time and know what features rental websites need. So, we carefully build our All-in-One rental software to transition your physical rental business to a digital one with all the necessary features and tools.
Please note: when you use Reservety, you do not just get a website but also get your personalized app, through which your customers book items, pay for them, and have them delivered to their location.
Are you ready to start an innovative rental business with Reservety? Try its 14-day free trial without any credit cards or contracts.
