Handling the booking process is a common stumbling block when running a rental business with a large inventory. Potential customers will keep reaching out through phone calls, emails, and texts to ask about availability, pricing, reservations, and more. This back-and-forth can eat up a lot of time causing problems like double bookings, missed chances, and unhappy clients. A rental equipment site can alleviate some of these issues.
The MotoPress Appointment Booking plugin can help here too. It’s a dynamic WordPress scheduling solution that aims to simplify your entire booking process. This central system can give your business real-time availability calendars, automated booking processes, seamless payment integrations, and much more.
Regardless of whether you rent out event decor, cameras, power tools, or any other products or services, this tutorial will help. In this post, you’ll discover how to create a rental equipment site with WordPress – with ease!
The Perks of Using the MotoPress Appointment Booking Plugin
Your rental equipment site needs a few key pieces of functionality to succeed in the marketplace. Of course, a straightforward and high-converting interface is important. So are performance and security features.
Functionality that focuses on your visitors and potential customers should also be a priority. One vital aspect is the ability to view, reserve, and rent from you. This is where the MotoPress Appointment Booking Plugin will slot in.
This does more than just make scheduling straightforward; it loads up a collection of top-notch features focusing on booking rentals:
- Flexible reservation choices. You can give customers ways to book various types of equipment with ease, whether for individual or group rentals, using a dedicated ‘wizard’. This flexibility can suit a wide range of use cases, which can help you manage your inventory better.
- Auto alerts. There’s a full notification system on offer, which lets you send email or text alerts to team members and customers. The plugin automates these reminders, so you can send reminders for viewings, confirm rentals, let them know about availability, and everything in between.
- Adjustable reservation forms. You’re able to customize your reservation forms to align with your company’s existing branding. The plugin is compatible with almost all of the popular WordPress page builders, including the WordPress Block Editor, Elementor, and Divi.
There’s plenty more we can show you about MotoPress’ Appointment Booking plugin, so let’s get into it with our tutorial – after a quick detour into the pricing options.
How Much MotoPress’ Appointment Booking Plugin Costs
The good news is the Appointment Booking plugin has straightforward pricing:
- There’s a single-site license for $79.00.
- For all the licenses you need, it costs $199.00.
Regardless of the licensing you choose, you get all of the features and functionality available in the plugin.
How to Build a Rental Equipment Site Using WordPress and MotoPress’ Appointment Booking Plugin
Before you look at using any plugin, you should choose a suitable theme for your rental equipment site. We’re using Equipment Rental by wpelemento here, although there will be many others.
For example, MotoPress has successfully integrated this booking plugin into various rental-driven designs in the Lorenty WordPress theme.
Of course, you also need to purchase, install, and activate the Appointment Booking plugin. Once you have all of these elements in place, you can begin with setting the plugin up within WordPress.
1. Configuring the Plugin
To find the key options for the plugin, head to Appointments > Settings within WordPress:
This lets you set some defaults for your booking entries. We won’t cover every option available here, but we do recommend you refer to the excellent documentation for more information on what you can customize. Even so, there are a few standout settings to note:
- Default Time Step. Here, choose the default length of your rental period, such as by the hour or week. Note that you can change this baseline option for individual products and services. We’ll cover this later.
- Booking Confirmation. Make sure you set the how you’ll confirm bookings. It could be automatic, manual, or upon payment.
- Terms and Conditions. We’d recommend you set up a dedicated page to your site, which outlines your rental policies. This could include cancellation terms, damage liabilities, late fees, and any other important factor for booking and renting.
After you make all the changes you wish, remember to save your changes. The next step is to add and customize team members, your business locations, and your rental schedules.
2. Add Team Members, Locations, and Schedule
Adding team members to your booking and rental system has a few benefits. First, you can assign specific equipment categories to your experts. Second, the customer gets the feeling of a personalized service, which can net you more rentals.
To add team members to your system, head to the Appointments > Employees screen, then click on Add New:
Here, input the member’s name, bio, photo, social media links, and contact details. Next, assign a specific rental services/equipment category to each team member. For example, if John is your power tool expert, assigning this category will send him dedicated notifications when a rental comes through.
Add Your Locations
If you run a physical location (or maybe multiple ones), the Appointments > Locations is where you’ll set them up. Even for online businesses, you’ll require one ‘location’. Here, click on Add New to create a new entry.
This is a straightforward screen that asks you to fill in details such as your location name, address, and any specific notes you need to document.
Once you save your changes, head over to the Appointments > Schedule page to set up and manage your team member’s schedules. After you click the Add New button, you can define working hours and availability for each employee.
You’ll specify the days and times when each employee is available within the Timetable metabox. What’s more, you can set different schedules across the week, adjust for holidays, and even add break blocks.
3. Setting Up Rental Equipment Site Categories
Before you add your rental equipment, you have to first create relevant categories. This helps to arrange your equipment into groups. In turn, this makes it simpler for customers to look through and pick out equipment. You do this through the Appointments > Services Categories screen:
To create categories, click the Add New button, and enter the name of the category. If you want to, also include a short explanation to help clarify the available equipment in this category. For instance, you might set up broad categories such as Construction Equipment, Party Supplies, or Audio/Visual Equipment. Note that not all themes will display this information though.
Once you fill out the details, save your changes and move onto setting up your equipment inventory.
4. Adding Equipment as Services
You’ll add each piece of equipment as a service within the categories you define. To do this, go to Appointments > Services within WordPress, then click on Add New. First, enter the name of the equipment and provide a description. This will display on the front-end of your site and help customers understand the piece of equipment they want to rent.
There are plenty of settings and options here to customize your equipment entry further. For example, the Price and Duration fields let you set the rental price and individual rental duration to differ from the default you set at first. You could set hourly rentals for power tools, and weekly rentals for equipment such as lawnmowers.
Next, take a look at your Time Slot Intervals to customize how often customers can book the equipment. The Buffer Time option lets you add in extra time to account for preparation, cleanup, and return overruns.
Further on down, you can set up how far in advance customers can book, and set the minimum and maximum number of items they can reserve at once:
To configure inventory settings, enable “Group reservations” and create a custom name for your bookable item.
For example, if you rent different furniture types and want to display available quantities in booking forms, you can simply type “Items.” Then it will be shown like this for boats:
The final few sections deal with assigning team members to equipment, setting up notifications for rental reminders, and arranging whether a customer requires a deposit to secure a booking.
In the next section, we’ll look at adding payment gateways in greater detail.
5. Set Up Payments
To ensure a smooth transaction with every equipment rental, you’ll need to set up payment gateways. MotoPress Appointment Plugin offers various payment options, such as PayPal, Stripe, Apple Pay, Google Pay, and many more.
To enable these, navigate to Appointments > Settings > Payments within WordPress:
Each available gateway will have a Manage button to help you set things up. Note that you’ll need an API key, account information, and other credentials and validation in order to complete the setup:
The plugin offers a ‘Sandbox Mode’ for each payment gateway too. This lets you test payments before you go live. We’d recommend you do this in order to catch any bugs. You don’t want to let a potential paying customer encounter issues, as it could have a negative impact on a sale and your reputation.
6. Integrating Rental Equipment Site Forms into Your Website
Booking forms will let you customers to rent equipment in a flash. You’ll use shortcodes to set this up. First, navigate to the Appointment > Shortcode screen, then click on Add New and select Appointment Form from the drop-down menu:
You can now customize your rental equipment booking form. Here are some tips of setting your forms up:
- Form Title. This internal identifier lets you assign a dedicated label to your form.
- Default Values. You can configure which elements you want to display on your form, such as the Service Category, Service, Location, and Employee.
- Styles. This panel helps you adjust the form’s appearance to match your site’s design. You can change the form width, text colors (primary and secondary), background colors, and button padding to ensure the design is consistent.
- Timepicker Settings. Here, you can define specific start and end times for your services. This ensures that your booking times match your hours of business.
Once you configure the form, you can generate the shortcode through the Publish button, and copy it. At this point, you’ll want to add the shortcode to a specific WordPress page.
Within the Block Editor, add a Shortcode Block and paste in your form’s shortcode. For page builder plugins, there’s likely going to be a dedicated shortcode widget to access.
Once you save your changes, you can view the form on the front end:
You may also add the form or any other related content with dedicated blocks in the block editor or widgets in Elementor.
With a complete booking form and rental inventory in place, you can send it live and begin to take on custom. An ongoing step will be to monitor your rentals.
7. Tracking Bookings and Analyzing Insights
Insights into your rental activity can help you improve your business operations and overall customer experience. The MotoPress Appointment Booking plugin lets you view dedicated metrics, analytics, and insights for all manner of actions.
You can find them at Appointment > Analytics within WordPress. The dashboard gives you a quick overview of your booking statistics across your locations, equipment, and team members. You can also see the status of all rental equipment, including confirmations, those waiting for approval, or cancellations.
The Revenue chart lets you see how much you earn from rentals, and you can break it down by a number of metrics. For all of the statistics and analytics on offer, you have filters for time periods, which helps you hone in on a specific week, month, quarter, or even year.
Elevate Your Rental Equipment Site with MotoPress’ Appointment Booking Plugin!
With a rental equipment site that uses MotoPress’ Appointment Booking Plugin, your customers can browse your inventory, check availability, and book anytime anywhere within a few clicks. Its a top choice, thanks to its robust functionality to help you manage reservations, process payments, and streamline your rentals. Given the low price, it provides excellent value for the broad range of functions it offers.
Will MotoPress’ Appointment Booking plugin find a home on your rental equipment site? Share your thoughts and experiences in the comments section below!
