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If customers can't book your items instantly, you are essentially closed. In the modern rental landscape, availability is the foundation of success. It is not just about having items in stock; it is about ensuring those items are bookable 24/7 without requiring manual intervention.
Relying on email inquiries or store hours creates a bottleneck. By digitalizing your catalog, you transform your operation from a manual service to an automated commerce engine.
Advanced rental software allows for a seamless connection between your warehouse and your customer's screen. Whether a booking comes from your white-label store, a third-party app, or a walk-in customer, a centralized system updates availability across all channels immediately. This allows you to scale sales channels without risking customer satisfaction through overselling.
Karri: Today, we are talking about this dreamlike rental business and how you can achieve it. Let's start with availability.
Tuomo: Availability is kind of where everything, I think, starts from. So if you don't have your items available to be booked, then essentially you're closed for business so customers cannot buy from you. And in the case of bookings, one key thing on availability is the question that can your customers see what's available and create bookings 24-7? Or is your booking system such that they have to contact you via an email or phone or even walk into the store, meaning that your availability for purchase is at the end of the day, your opening hours or the response rate that you have on your emails? So that's kind of where everything starts.
Tuomo: So talking about availability, let's start with the kind of availability of your offering and whether it's 24-7 or whether it's somehow limited by your opening hours.
Karri: Okay, so basically 24-7 availability means that the items have to be online or bookable outside of the work hours or the opening hours of the actual store. And this can be your online store or any other channel.
Tuomo: Yeah, so in practice it means that your catalog, so the things that your customers can book from you is available. Usually you have your own online store where those items are or listings are available. And at the same time, you could have this available on a booking platform or aggregation platform where someone could book or rent those items. Examples of this is, for example, Bokun or similar. So any channel which is up and running 24-7 and accessible by end users 24-7.
Karri: Okay, and most likely the first step is just to get your listings online so they are bookable outside of your opening hours. And then you can start to actually increase the availability by being listed in more and more channels. So I think Google AI and these marketplaces and of course your own online store are just a few examples of these places where you might want to be available.
Tuomo: Exactly. And I think usually the challenge for merchants or rental stores come from the fact that they might be able to set up their catalog to be accessible online. But they want to protect their customer experience by making sure that they don't oversell or they don't get double bookings. And that's kind of often the challenge why someone hasn't gone to this 24-7 availability because the actual process of taking in a booking has an element where in some cases even kind of a human has to go through a calendar or an Excel or something to see whether they can actually serve that order or not. Whereas services like Twice Commerce makes this automated, meaning that all of the availability of your items are also in real time managed. And kind of when the end customer is browsing your catalog online, they are kind of seeing the real time availability of your catalog. So there's no risk of getting double bookings. So this is kind of the key thing. So this is kind of an important element on kind of as a next step that first get online and then when you get online, you probably want to use solutions that make sure that your catalog when it is online, it is connected to your inventory and thus kind of the actual availability of your stock items.
Karri: Absolutely. And I think Twice is a really good example of this that it comes out with this built-in white label online store. It's using the same inventory, same availabilities, but then you are able to create listings on third-party marketplaces and then actually there's an API available which can actually check like, hey, these dates or this time that the customer is looking for some type of rental or maybe reservation experience on some platform, it can actually go and check the exact same items. Are they available there? And so make sure that they know double bookings, but making sure that you get maximum amount of orders from different sales channels. And of course, the same logic happens if somebody just walks into your store and you have the admin open, you can check the same availability, same inventory.
Tuomo: Exactly. So this is kind of the key thing. So we started from the fact that let's get your catalog online for people to be able to browse all of your offering and to make orders without you having to be there to facilitate that order creation. And the requirements for that essentially is a digitalized catalog, which pricing is a big part of that we're going to talk about in a bit. And then the other fact is this real-time availability management that your online catalog and the listings there are connected to your real inventory and the real availability of your inventory that takes into account not only other orders, but internal maintenance and so on.