Build your first listings

Part of step 5 of the launch path, Build your catalog. Inventory is what you own; the catalog is what a customer can buy. This is the pass that turns the first into the second. Build one listing all the way through before you build twenty. A listing is finished across six tabs, and the ones people skip are invisible until a customer hits them. One listing done properly is a pattern you can repeat in minutes; twenty half-finished listings are twenty separate investigations. The finish line for this step is not “the listing is saved”. It is a listing that shows correct availability for a real date.

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The six passes over one listing

Open a listing from Catalog → Listings. The tabs are not a wizard — you can work them in any order — but this order gets you to bookable with the fewest revisits. Leave Status on Draft for passes 1 to 5. Switching to Public is the last thing you do, not the first — a listing published half-built is a live listing that does not work. Two more tabs matter later and not now: Attributes carries the catalog attributes you designed in step 3, and Checkout settings holds the fields a customer fills in at checkout. Neither blocks a booking.

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Variants: decide what actually differs

Every combination of your variant options becomes a variant, and the Variants tab keeps a running Total variants count. Three sizes and four colours is twelve variants — twelve things that can be individually priced, individually stocked, and individually wrong. Before adding an option, decide which of three cases you are in: Most first listings need name-only variants, or none. Setting up per-variant stock and pricing you did not need is maintenance you carry for the life of the listing. If the grid is mostly empty — you stock three of twelve combinations — those are separate listings, not variants. Publishing is per listing, so anything sold at only some locations has to be its own listing regardless.

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Pricing: one table, or a rate card shared across many

Prices live in price tables, not on the listing. On the Pricing tab, adding a table offers two things, and the choice is the one to make deliberately: A shared table’s purchase types and prices are edited on the table itself; on a linked listing they are read-only, marked Controlled by the linked price table. Before editing a shared table, open its Linked listings — listings that are using this price table — because a shared rate card is a shared consequence. Inside a table, three sections decide what a customer can do with the listing. Each is a switch, and a section that is off is a purchase type the listing does not offer: Booking prices come in two shapes and they answer different questions. Fixed price per duration sells named periods — a day pass, a weekend rate. Rate based bills the duration actually booked, a day running 24 hours from pickup. On a fixed-duration price the unit dropdown offers each unit twice — Day (Elapsed) runs the full period from pickup, Day (Started) derives the return from the pickup day — and that suffix is a revenue decision, not a formatting one. Price a listing works it through with a real booking. Turning Booking price on also brings out the Booking deposit card on the Pricing tab, which is hidden until at least one of the listing’s tables offers bookings. The deposit belongs to the listing, not to the table it appears beside — one listing holds one deposit however many tables it carries.

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One SKU, a rental listing and a resale listing

Nothing in TWICE scopes a stock item to a single listing. A listing’s Fulfilment rule matches stock — by SKU, by attribute, by name — and two listings whose rules match the same units share one pool. That is how the same thing is rented and sold without duplicating your inventory, and it is the thing a rental-only system cannot do. Two ways to set it up, and they are not equivalent: Whichever you pick, one behaviour is worth knowing before it surprises you: a sale takes the unit permanently, from the moment the order is committed. A booking occupies its window and releases the unit afterwards; a sale occupies the unit from now on, and a future-dated sale still takes it immediately. So a unit sold on the resale listing leaves the rental listing’s availability at once, which is correct — but it means selling out of your rental fleet is a thing that can happen quietly if both listings draw on the same pool with nothing separating them. If you want a resale channel that cannot eat the fleet, separate the pools with an attribute — a retired or for sale flag on the stock item — and match each listing’s rule on it. The fleet to resale guide covers moving units between them.

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Limits: what a customer is allowed to book

Four settings on the Limits tab — the shortest booking, the longest, the increment between them, and how late an order can be placed. They take a minute to fill in and are the difference between a fleet you control and one a customer can book for a year. Two of them behave differently depending on how the listing is priced, and this catches people: None of the four constrains a sale — a sale has no duration and no start time. Set them anyway on anything you rent, and set the order deadline in particular: it is the only setting that stops a too-soon booking appearing on the storefront calendar at all. Full detail in purchase and booking limits.

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Collections: how customers find any of this

A collection groups listings so customers can browse them together. It is merchandising, not filing — a listing sits in several collections at once, and being in one changes nothing about the listing. For a launch, build manual collections. A smart collection joins listings by their tags automatically, which is the better tool once tagging is a habit and a liability before then: inconsistent tags give you a collection that is quietly wrong rather than obviously empty. Smart collections match on tags only — not price, category, attribute or availability. Build them around how people shop — by activity, by season, by who it is for — rather than mirroring your internal categories. A customer who has never seen your catalog should reach a representative item in two clicks.

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Publish, then check the real thing

Open preview renders the listing in a drawer inside the admin, with the booking action disabled. It is good for copy, images and pricing, and it will happily render a listing that is not published, not available at the location, or restricted to a customer tag you are not in. Open in storefront opens the real page. That is the check that proves publishing worked, because a listing that failed to publish is simply not there. Do the second, on a real date, before you move on to the next listing.

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Done when

• One listing is complete across all six tabs, and Status is Public.
• Its Fulfilment rule reports a non-zero matches in inventory count, and the units it matches are at the location you sell from.
• The undated Default price table is priced — not only a dated overlay — with Purchase price, Booking price or both switched on.
• Any shared rate card’s Linked listings contains exactly the listings you meant to price.
• The listing opens in the storefront — not just in preview — and shows a price for a real date.
• It can be added to an order for that date, and doing so holds a unit.
• Booking limits are set on anything you rent, including an order deadline.
• The listings you have built are in at least one collection, and that collection opens on the storefront.
• You can build the second listing by repeating this, without looking anything up.

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