Show HN: Rentify – Create an online rental store | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: Rentify – Create an online rental store

rentify.store

80 pointschris14095761 comments

Cool idea! I used to run a kinda similar company in the video space. A few questions:

Any plans to help with fraud? This looks like voluntary parting, so most insurance companies won’t help with theft.

If you hold a deposit and it ends up being a stolen card, you have to refund the money. Or Stripe will take it back when the card owner reports the fraudulent charge.

Some advice:

- take more than 10%, account for some of that money going to fraud cleanup

- if it’s an item you don’t want to have to replace, do as many anti-fraud checks as you can. Four years ago Stripe wasn’t enough: a combination of Stripe/Sift Science/in-house heuristics made the problem easier

- make sure you have proper legal protections in place. If a rental shop gets hit big with fraud, it’s not unlikely that they’ll sue you

I know these seem like problems to solve for way in the future, but I started seeing fraudulent attempts almost as soon as I started seeing rentals.

Good luck!

Another user has raised this point, and it seems totally valid. I think I need to add the ability to put a holding deposit on a customers card, and probably also update the terms of service...

At a minimum! Like I said, the deposit is meaningless if it’s a stolen card.

Anecdotally, our fraud attempts dropped drastically when we blocked pre-paid credit cards. I’m sure we lost some legitimate business, but when weighing a 10% cut of a rental fee against replacing a stolen item, the math worked out.

Have started reading the stripe radar docs...

Hi, I just launched Rentify

Rentify is aimed at owners of small rental stores who currently take bookings via phone/email only but want to have a proper online store with online payments, etc. It provides card payments through Stripe and full inventory and schedule management.

Thanks for looking, Chris

Your pricing seems cheap. How does it compare to the market?

There are more expensive options out there, who are VC-backed. Their pricing is much higher (like £5k per year in some cases). This is a downstream opportunity - I'm targeting small rental businesses who currently take orders via email/phone only, who wouldn't necessarily have the budget for the more expensive players

The pricing also seems weird, the free plan has a 10% fee on all bookings while the paid one doesn't.

So after $300 worth of bookings, you are making more money off the "free" plan then the paid plan?

Pricing is still WIP, but essentially yes, if a user is putting even a small amount of revenue through this thing then it makes more sense to sign up for a standard account. I’m trying to encourage users to do this in order to get consistent revenue

How can I get in touch with you? Tried emailing the domain.

chris@rentify.store. I’ll put this in the landing page too

I am interested in signing up to rent out my heavy equipment. I will message you directly.

I like the idea, and could even be interested. A demo site or even a few screenshots would help. I don't want to sign up just to see if it does what I hope it does.

Edited to add: If you actually click through to the terms of use, then go back to the sign up form, your details are deleted, but it seems like you can't open the ToU or privacy policy in a new window.

I've been meaning to put up a demo store, here's a link to it: https://store.rentify.store/#/P9EuoPUMJ

I'll put this link on the landing page too, once I've added a few more products to it.

I'll update the legal docs to open in a new page

I had a look at this. So, I’m renting a bike.. where am I renting it from?

When you place a booking, it shows you the collection address. But you're probably right, this should be a lot more visible before you get to that stage.

The idea is that you refer customers to this site from your main website, but its still valid feedback

That page is not rendering for me on mobile Safari, it’s just giving me a blank page

Are you including the full path? The last part of the URL is the unique store id - It will render a blank page if that's omitted. On my mobile safari, HN doesn't show me the full URL, but when I click on it, it renders fine

The font is so small and thin that it's hard to read

This is fair, will update

A suggestion: don't hide the entire store component when you change one of the filters. You can see it flash with unstyled text "loading" before popping back into view. It's much less jarring if you keep the existing content rendered while waiting on the response and swapping it out after the request completes rather than going to a blank screen when you start the request.

My personal preference is more subtle loading indicators near the element that triggered the interaction (the filter inputs themselves in this case) but that's probably subjective. I think at the very least you should keep filter bar visible while it's loading so that the element you're interacting with doesn't disappear while you're using it and pop back into view.

Love the idea and think this could be a huge market. Just wondering if you guys help with theft, damage, or insurance too? What are the best practices for this?

It’s not something I’ve considered, but would certainly add the functionality of there was the demand for it. How do you think this would look?

Not to be harsh, but have you actually run a rental store yourself before? Because id management, theft, and damage are the main issues that people face when doing so. If you haven't considered it, then I suggest you start researching immediately, because your customers WILL come back and say their tool was stolen and they need help or will request compensation.

I haven’t, it’s interesting to hear feedback from those who haven’t. Whenever I rent a car, I pay in advance online, and then pay a security deposit/they put a hold on my card in the store. Presumably a feature like that would address your concerns here?

Table stakes but likely won’t be enough. If it’s a stolen card, the owner will charge back and you can’t keep the deposit. If you get too many chargebacks your payment provider will drop you. If you charge someone for damage they did that they don’t want to own up to, they will issue a chargeback. You will likely win the dispute if you can point to ToS violations but it’s a huge pain and ties up money for a few weeks.

In your example, the car rental company is doing something on the backend to determine your trustworthiness before they give you the car—you should consider a similar approach.

So, I’ve had a quick look through the stripe docs and am now planning to:

- add stripe radar to identify payments made on stolen cards

- add the ability to request a security deposit, which puts a hold on the customers card

Would that cover most issues?

Depends on how good Radar is these days. I’d recommend some sort of identity verification service for new accounts. Not a full background check but a few additional hurdles weed out many unsophisticated fraud attempts. Anecdotally, a friend told me that calling new signups and manually verifying them works well. At this stage this would have the bonus for you of learning more about the folks using your system.

This is actually covered by stripe connect - users wanting to accept card payments through Rentify need to go through stripe’s is verification process, which involves uploading copies of your ID. Stripe also provides chargeback protection, which I have enabled, which covers any costs due to fraud

That’s great to hear; that’s a huge value add if it’s effective!

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Fixed now, thanks for the heads up.

I'm new to the community but the overall wisdom suggests that you should, if possible, save releasing on HN till you have the MVP. It's a good gauge for measuring the interest but if you launch after you have the MVP, you could legit get more traction, sign-ups, paying leads and actionable feedback. Because I'm not quite sure if you launch the same thing after you have the MVP, it would have the same reception since it was already launched once. Obviously, let me know if I'm wrong, because it's what I'm under the impression because even I'm waiting to release a personal project once it's done.

Hi, thanks for the feedback, but actually this is fully functional right now

I agree, just make sure to keep the M really minimal. Lots of people fall into the feature trap and end up releasing way too late.

Looks like an MVP to me.

This might be confusing for folks looking to find you and they end up on rentify.com, also based in the UK

Yeah I noticed this straight after launch too.... really bad research on my part

You should change your name. Don’t worry, this launch is also part of the research.

Yep, I suspect I'm going to have to.

Congrats ! I had a same idea (and same name idea !). But idea are cheap...

The base seem's solid, but you are a long way home : you can make order without mail and phone confirmation or paiement, so renters will end up with a lot of noise !

This is true, but it’s a problem that goes away when you enable payments on your account - once you’ve done that, customers must pay to place an order

Your landing page is built with Vue.js as a static SPA without any pre-rendered content in it. This is bad as Google will not index your page. I suggest using Nuxt.js for the landing page.

Doesn't Google correctly index this sort of SPAs nowdays?

I have a React SPA with no SSR and Google indexed it correctly.

didn't know, sorry

Cool concept. A couple months back I wished something like this existed so I could rent my home gym equipment while all the gyms were closed.

Thanks, that's not a use case I had thought about but an interesting one

Can it be used for lending products for free?

Yes - its possible to create a pricing plan for a product with a price of zero. In this configuration, Rentify can be used completely free of charge

Hi there, which of the three Stripe Connect account types did you go with?

Express, I wanted to make the onboarding process as easy as possible given that my users are not necessarily particularly technical or familiar with Stripe

I love this idea. You should also explain how you differ from Shopify.

Shopify isn't specifically targeted at rentals. Rentify lets you specify what's in your inventory and will show the customer exactly when items in your store are available - so it doesn't handle things like clashing booking times

Thanks was wondering that also. Can it be replicated vi a shopify or wix with a 'rental' module if such a a thing exists? Just curious.

Wasn't there a similar concept in the YCS20 batch?

Targetted at storage?

I'm not familiar with that one, but quite possibly. This isn't a unique product - there are others out there which do a similar thing. However, those are all VC-backed and quite expensive in comparison to this. This is more of a downmarket opportunity - I'm targeting smaller rental store owners who cannot accept online bookings/payments currently. This is completely bootstrapped so it's easy enough for me to position myself that way

It was W20 : OpenUnit

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24433031

No affiliation whatsoever.

Pricing is in GBP, is it available in the USA?

Yes - You can select the currency you want once you’ve logged in. Currently we support USD, EUR and GBP payments but can theoretically support any currency that stripe does. I just haven’t gotten around to adding the rest yet

This is great. Congrats on launching. :)

Thanks!

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