Rental Duration Options

Choose between predefined and manual rental durations, and understand the pros/cons of each

There are two options to use for rental durations in Product Rentals Pro - Predefined and Manual Selection.

Predefined Rental Durations: The customer first selects from predefined duration options (such as 7 days, 14 days and 28 days), and then they select their preferred start date in the calendar. The end date is automatically calculated and displayed on screen to the customer.

Manually-Selected Date Ranges: The customer selects their start date from the availability calendar, then selects their end date. They can select any number of days they like.

This setting can be updated, either from the Quickstart Guide on the home screen after you first install Product Rentals Pro, or from the Rental Settings screen.

Below is a table comparing the options:

	Predefined Durations	Manual Selection
How does a customer select their rental period?	Customer first selects from the predefined durations you've set up for the product (e.g. 3 days, 7 days), then selects their preferred start date. The customer can't select a rental duration that doesn't match one of the predefined durations that's been set up.	Customer selects their preferred start date in the calendar, then selects the end date. Any number of days can be selected.
Pricing	Pricing is controlled natively, by Shopify variants. You set the price for each predefined duration, meaning it's easy to make longer rentals have a cheaper per-day rate.	The price for the product/variant in Shopify must be set to the daily rental fee. The total price for the item in the Cart/Order is calculated as the daily rental fee x the number of days in the date-range selected. It's not possible to offer a reduced per-day rate as the rental duration increases.
How does it work under the hood?	Uses standard/native Shopify pricing.	Uses Shopify cart-transforms to generate a dynamic/calculated price for the line item.
How does this present in checkout?	Standard checkout with individual line items.	The cart-transform results in the product appearing as a sub-product of itself. It's not ideal but this can't be avoided when a cart-transform has been used to apply dynamic pricing (to override the variant price set in Shopify)
Does it work well with other apps?	Yes.	Generally, yes. However, any other apps that control or manipulate the Cart in any way may have trouble or conflict with the cart-transforms.
Other impacts	None.	The price of rental items within Orders generated directly in Shopify or directly in PRP will result in a line-item price which is the daily rental fee. The only way to increase the price is to use the line item quantity, setting this to the number of days the item is being rented.

We recommend you use predefined durations unless you really require customers to select any number of days.

Using cart-transforms is essentially a workaround to be able to get dynamic pricing working on Shopify. There are downsides to this as listed in the table above.

How do they look on the website?

When using Predefined Durations, the PRP Rental Widget looks and works like this:

With Manually-selected Date Ranges, the PRP Rental Widget looks and works like this:

How does it look in Checkout?

When using Predefined Durations, the item summary in checkout looks just like it normally does on Shopify:

With Manually-selected Date Ranges, the cart-transform required to set the price of the line item dynamically, results in the item summary looking like the below. Unfortunately there is no way around this.

Days calculation for Manually-selected Date Ranges

The default behaviour is for the number of days to be inclusive of both the start and end date of the rental. In our experience, this is what most businesses using PRP prefer.

As an example, that would mean selection of the 1st of the month to the 4th of the month, would be treated as 4 days (1st, 2nd, 3rd, 4th) and the cart price would be the daily rental fee x 4.

This can be switched to effectively count 'nights', such that 1st to the 4th would actually only be 3 days rental (the night of the 1st, 2nd and 3rd - but not the 4th).

This setting is in your Rental Settings screen and appears directly under the duration type field, if you've chosen Manually-selected Date Ranges.