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.
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.
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.
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
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
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.
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.
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
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
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?
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.
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
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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.
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 !
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.
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
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
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
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
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!