Setting up your Products in Shopify

How to best configure product settings and options/variants for your rental products

For the most part, rental products can be set up in Shopify, much the same way you would set up any other product. We've highlighted the key things to focus on below - everything else can be configured as you need, just like any other Product in Shopify.

Set Inventory Tracking to Off

We recommend having the Track quantity setting under Inventory set to off.

Shopify is not designed to track inventory of rentals well. Product Rentals Pro takes care of this entirely, so you can just leave it to PRP and disable this on the Product in Shopify.

As the Product is a rental, you don't want Shopify reducing your quantity count each time an Order is placed or fulfilled. This can make your quantity count go to zero or negative, in which case Shopify may prevent new Orders being placed unless you have "Continue selling when out of stock" enabled.

As an example, the Order may be for a rental date starting in 2 months time, so you wouldn't want inventory to be reduced now, preventing someone from renting that item this month.

If your Product has already been created with Inventory Tracking on, and has Variants, you'll need to disable this on each individual Variant. This can be done on many Variants at once with the feature just above the Variant list.

Creating an Option to use as the rental duration

Product Rentals Pro works with Shopify Products by using an option on the Product to determine the duration of the rental.

We do it this way because it means all pricing, order totals, etc, is handled by standard Shopify functionality. You simply set the price for each duration by updating the price of the relevant variant in Shopify.

Note that if a Product is only available for 1 single duration (e.g. 7 days), then creating an option on the Product to specify the duration may not be entirely necessary. You can still use the Product with Product Rentals Pro, by setting the default duration in Product Rental Pro's "Rental Settings" to 7 days.

Any rental product where the duration isn't set in the options will fall back to the default duration when a customer goes to rent it.

When editing a Product within the Shopify admin, scroll down to "Variants".

The box allows you to create up to three Options for the Product. This might include the regular options you would normally have when selling a Product, such as Size, Colour or Style.

If the Product is a rental product, and you want to specify different durations it can be rented for, then one of these Options will need to be used for the duration. What you name the Option is up to you, and it can differ on each Product if needed.

Some examples include: Duration, Rental Duration, Hire Duration, Hire Period.

Then you can enter the specific durations that the Product can be rented for, like the example below.

Further below on the screen you can then set the pricing for each option combination (i.e. each Variant). In the example above the price for the "Small / 4 day" Variant might be $100, but the "Small / 8 day" Variant can be set to $150.

Once that's done for a Product, it just needs to be imported into Product Rentals Pro (if it hasn't been imported before). From there you can set the Units & Durations for the Product, and then it's ready to be rented by your customers!

Note: If a Product has been imported into Product Rentals Pro before, you don't need to re-import or do anything manually for any changes to the Product options to apply. It will automatically be captured by Product Rentals Pro.

You'll just need to make sure any new Options you haven't used before are set up in Options & Variants Settings and then ensure you've set the Units & Durations for the Product in Product Rentals Pro.