Hacker News Reader

Comment by bakztfuture | Hacker News Reader

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?

View on HN

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!

Reply on news.ycombinator.com