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Setting up online reservation

Customers can make their reservations online themselves. That is what My Rental - Connect is for: a reservation portal listing your own capacities, through which customers send inquiries. Five steps are needed — after that, the inquiries arrive in the app and are answered there.

1. Create capacities in the app​

A reservation always refers to a capacity, meaning a kind of thing together with its quantity. Everything that should be reservable online is therefore created in the app first: Creating a capacity. For a first test, the sample data available after registration is enough.

2. Set prices with a price model​

Prices are not attached to the individual capacity but to its category: exactly one price model can be assigned to a category, and it determines how the price follows from duration and quantity. In a capacity's dialog, the "Edit and assign price models" button leads to the price models. Which models exist and how they calculate is described under Price models.

Without a price model, a category stays without a price. And for customers to actually see the prices in the portal, the "Show prices" option in the shop has to be enabled as well — see step 5.

3. Sign in to My Rental - Connect​

The reservation portal is not set up in the app but in the browser, at connect.rental-shop.app. The same credentials as in the app apply there — no additional account is needed.

The app leads there as well: as long as there are no inquiries yet, the tab "Inquiries" shows the hint "Open Connect for online inquiries".

4. Import and release availabilities​

In My Rental - Connect the capacities are not created again but imported from the app:

  • Open the "Availabilities" section and click "Import". This can take a few minutes — see Overview of availabilities.
  • Then click every availability that should be reservable online in the table and tick the "Activate" checkbox in the dialog. Without this step it stays invisible to customers.
  • In the same dialog you can add a description and images that are shown to customers during the reservation. Images are uploaded beforehand under the "Files" navigation item — see Managing availabilities.
Tip

The import does not currently happen automatically. It should be repeated after changes to the capacities in the app — and at regular intervals otherwise — so that everything current is reservable online.

5. Set the portal's address​

For customers to reach the portal, it needs a public address (domain). One is generated automatically at first and can be replaced in the "Shop" section with your own, containing your shop name for example. That section also determines which terms and privacy notices appear at checkout and whether customers see the prices — what is then shown are the prices from the price models of step 2: Shop settings.

This address is the one customers get — as a link from your own website, for instance.

Answering inquiries​

From now on, customers can make reservations. Every reservation arrives in the app as an inquiry and is accepted or declined there; an accepted inquiry becomes a booking. How that works is described under Managing inquiries.

In addition, you can store notices that customers see on the portal's start page: Overview of notices.