Rentalbuddy

Create and manage products

11 min read

Everything a customer can buy is a product — the kayak itself, the dry bag you rent with it, the insurance, the guided tour, the season pass. They all live on the same page and share the same form, and which fields appear depends on the product type you choose.

Products belong to a location. A product created for one location is not visible at another; to sell the same thing in two places you copy it (see Copy a product to another location below).

Where it is

  1. Open Products in the menu.
  2. Pick the location in the navigation bar at the top.
  3. Press Add new product.

The list only shows the products of the location selected in the navigation bar. If Add new product is greyed out, hover it — it will tell you why:

  • "Select a location in the navigation bar before creating a product" — nothing is selected, or the selected location no longer exists.
  • If you have no locations at all, you get "You need to create a location before you can create a product" and a Click to create your first location link.

The very first product on an account also asks you to pick your currency before the form opens.

The product types

Select product type is the first field, and it is the one decision you cannot change later — the field is locked once the product has been saved. If you picked wrong, create a new product and delete the old one.

Type What it is
Rental Product The thing being rented by time — a bike, a kayak, a board. Has hour and day pricing, stock, and can be linked to a lock.
Rental Accessory An extra sold alongside a rental — helmet, dry bag, child seat. Priced per day, attached to a rental product. See Add-ons and accessories.
Insurance A fee added to the booking rather than a physical unit. No stock, and it can be made non-removable.
Event A scheduled, per-person offering with fixed start times and spots per session. See Events, sessions and price variants.
Membership A membership plan with its own price, length in months and rental discount.

Fill in the product

The form is two columns and one Save button at the top saves the whole thing.

The required fields

You cannot save without these:

  1. Select product type.
  2. Art. No — an article number. The form suggests the lowest number not already used by one of your products or events, so you can normally leave it.
  3. Short name — 1 to 5 characters. This is the label shown in Booking management, so make it readable at a glance: "KAY", "BIKE".
  4. Sort Order in booking view (lowest number has the highest priority) — a number from 1 to 500 that decides the order customers see. Duplicates are allowed but the resulting order is then arbitrary, so leave gaps (10, 20, 30) if you plan to insert products later.
  5. Product name — in English at minimum. Saving without it gives "English product name is required".
  6. Number of units — see Inventory below. Not asked for Insurance or Membership.
  7. Taxes — at least one, see Taxes below.
  8. A price. What counts as a valid price depends on the type; the exact rules are under Pricing below.

Product image

The Product Image card sits at the top left. Note that this is a file upload, not a link — drag an image onto the dashed area or click it to pick a file. Allowed formats are JPEG, PNG, GIF, WebP, BMP and SVG, up to 10 MB.

Once an image is set, the buttons change to Change Image and Remove. If you see "Please select a site first to enable image upload", the product has no location yet — pick the location in the navigation bar and reopen the form.

Insurance products have no image card.

Product names and descriptions

The Product Names & Descriptions card holds the customer-facing text: Product name and Description.

Both are per language. The language buttons above the fields show the languages the location's booking view is set to display, with the main language first. Switch language, type, switch back — the field content changes with the selected language and each language is stored separately.

Only English is enforced. Every other language is optional, and a language you leave empty is what produces the classic "the booking page is empty in German" report — so if you offer a language, fill it in.

Auto-translate is available from the toolbar at the top of the page. It translates from the location's main language into either one chosen language or all of them, filling in Product name and Description (and, for events, the long description, the customer information text and the price variant names). It writes into the form only — you still have to press Save, and you should read the result before you do.

Inventory

Number of units on the Inventory card is how many of this item you have — "How many units do you have available to rent (e.g. 1-4)."

Availability is this number minus whatever is already booked over the same period, so a product with 0 units is never bookable. There is no separate active/inactive switch on a product; setting the units to 0 is the closest thing to switching one off, and it stays in your product list either way.

For Event products this field is labelled Spots per session and means something different — see Events, sessions and price variants.

Taxes

Taxes is on the Pricing card and at least one entry is required — saving without one gives "Please select at least one tax".

The dropdown lists the tax rates defined for your account, each shown as its name, its percentage and whether it is inclusive or exclusive. You can tick more than one; they are then combined. The + button next to the dropdown creates a new tax rate without leaving the product, and the new rate is selected for you automatically.

If a location's country has standard rates and your account has none yet, a default set is created for you the first time you open a product form.

Older products may still show a plain Select VAT percentage field instead. That is the legacy field, kept visible only while a product has a VAT percentage and no tax rate selected; pick a proper tax in Taxes and it goes away.

Bookable weekdays and session lengths

Two more cards appear on the left for rental products:

  • Bookable weekdays — "Choose which weekdays customers can start a booking on. Leave all unselected to allow every day." It limits only the start day; a booking may still run across other days.
  • Fixed session lengths — only relevant when the location uses fixed time slots. Then at least one session length in hours or days is required, unless the location manages session lengths centrally, in which case the card says so and points you to the location's Booking experience tab.

Pricing

Simple price or price tiers

Rental products have a Price setup choice:

Option What it does
Price per hour "Set a fixed price per hour (e.g., 200 kr/hour)". One number. Charged strictly per hour, for any length, with no day discount.
Structured Pricing "Set different prices for different time lengths". A table of 24 hour prices and 7 day prices.

Price per hour is the right choice if you genuinely charge by the hour with no volume discount. Everyone renting for a day or more wants Structured Pricing.

Filling in the price table

Structured Pricing shows two rows of fields: Hour prices labelled 1h to 24h, and Day prices labelled 1 Day to 7 Days.

You do not have to type 31 numbers. The fields fill each other in:

  • Type the 1h price and every later hour follows the same step. Type 100 in 1h and the rest become 200, 300, 400 and so on.
  • Type a new value further along and everything after it recalculates from the new step. Typing 500 in 5h, when 4h is 400, keeps the step at 100. Typing 450 in 5h reduces every later hour accordingly.
  • Type a value lower than the hour before it and the price stops climbing — that hour and every hour after it, plus all seven day prices, are flattened to that value. This is how you get "everything above five hours costs 500".
  • The 24h price becomes the 1 Day price. That is why the 1 Day field is greyed out — a day is 24 hours by definition here, so you set it in the hour row.
  • Day prices cascade the same way from 2 Days onward.

Every hour and day price has to be filled in and greater than zero before the product saves. If it is not, you get "Please set prices to your product" and the season tab with the problem is marked in red.

What happens between the tiers

This surprises people, so it is worth spelling out. The table is not a set of buckets that round up — the system calculates the exact figure:

  • Whole hours are read straight from the table. 3 hours costs the 3h price.
  • Part hours are interpolated. A 3½-hour rental is the 3h price plus half of the step between 3h and 4h. Half an hour costs half the 1h price.
  • Exactly 24 hours is the 1 Day price.
  • Days plus hours is the day price plus the hour price — 1 day and 3 hours is 1 Day plus 3h — but it is capped at the next full day. If the sum would exceed the 2 Days price, the customer is charged the 2 Days price instead. So a customer never pays more for less time.
  • Longer than 7 days continues the last step. The system takes the difference between the 6 Days and 7 Days prices and adds it for each extra day. Any leftover hours beyond a whole day count as a further whole day.

If you want a hard ceiling — "a week and anything longer costs the same" — type the ceiling price into 7 Days, lower than your 6 Days price; every later day then continues at zero increase.

Day-of-week pricing

Tick Different prices by day of week to charge more at weekends.

You then get one multiplier per weekday: "Multiply price based on the day the booking starts. 1,0 = normal, 0,8 = −20%, 1,5 = +50%".

Two things to note:

  • The multiplier is chosen by the day the booking starts, not by each day it covers. A Friday-to-Monday rental is priced entirely at Friday's multiplier.
  • The same checkbox also reveals Add specific dates: a Start date, an End date and a Multiplier, for a public holiday or a festival week. A matching date rule overrides the weekday multiplier for bookings starting in that range.

High and low season

The Same price for high and low season checkbox is on by default. Untick it and you get two tabs, High Season and Low Season, each with its own complete price table.

Which of the two a booking is charged is not decided here. It is decided by the opening period on the location: each time period on the location's Open dates tab is marked as high or low season, and a booking falling inside that period uses the matching table. See Opening hours and open dates.

While Same price for high and low season is ticked, whatever you type on High Season is copied to the low season table, and the low season fields are locked.

Price variants

Price variant — several named prices such as adult and child on the same product — exists for Event products only. Rental products, accessories and insurance have a single price per season. See Events, sessions and price variants.

Copy a product to another location

This is the way to run one catalogue across several locations.

  1. Open the product and press Copy at the top of the page (or use the copy icon on the row in the product list).
  2. In Copy Product, choose the target Location. Only locations belonging to the same account are listed.
  3. Adjust the Product name — copying within the same location suggests a name marked as a copy so the two are distinguishable.
  4. Set the Inventory for the new location. Stock is rarely the same in two places.
  5. Press Save.

You then get "Product has been copied successfully!" with buttons to open the new product or jump to the target location's product list.

What comes along: everything else on the product — prices, tax selection, image, descriptions in every language, accessory links, settings. What does not: the article number, which is regenerated, and the EAN, which is cleared.

Events cannot be copied. The copy action is not offered for them.

Delete a product

Deleting is done from the product list, not from inside the product.

  1. Open Products.
  2. Press the bin icon on the row.
  3. Confirm Delete product in "Are you sure to delete this product?".

Two failures are worth knowing:

  • "This product is still linked to a station lock. Remove it from the lock via Stations page, then try again." A rental product assigned to a lock cannot be deleted, because the lock would be left pointing at nothing. Go to Stations, take the product off the lock, then delete it. The message contains a link straight there.
  • "This product could not be deleted. If this keeps happening, contact support." — anything else.

Deleting a product does not delete the bookings that were made for it. If you are retiring something mid-season, consider setting Number of units to 0 and leaving it in place until the last booking has been returned.

If a product does not show up for customers

Work down this list before assuming something is broken:

  1. Is the product on the right location? Products are per location and are not shared.
  2. Does Number of units show more than 0?
  3. Does the product have a valid price in the season the customer is trying to book — check both the High Season and Low Season tabs if you have separate prices.
  4. Does the location have an open period covering those dates? See Opening hours and open dates.
  5. If the location uses fixed time slots, does the product have at least one Fixed session lengths entry?
  6. Does Bookable weekdays exclude the day being tested?
  7. Is the product name filled in for the language the customer is browsing in?

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