How To Build a Rental Website For Your Business?

Subsequent to the exponential rise in the eCommerce industry, a rise in demand for online rental businesses has also been observed. If reports are to be trusted, online rental businesses are projected to reach an all-time high by 2025, estimating a $335 billion industry. So, in order to meet customer demands it has become important for rental businesses to have a website for renting products and managing all other operations. In this article, we take you through the various steps of creating an online rental website. 

Steps to Create a Rental Website

Find a Niche For your Rental Business

Narrowing down to a niche is important for your rental business to thrive. You should find a niche that has a market demand.  Also, People generally rent products that they can’t afford and are not used frequently. All these factors combined can help you in picking a niche for your rental website with a target group of customers. Furthermore, easy availability in bulk, affordable maintenance, and customers’ desire to rent your product will be important for your rental website to scale. 

Buy a Domain Name

The domain name is an address that your users use to find you or your business on the internet. You can get the desired domain name from any domain registrar on the internet. GoDaddy, Google, Namecheap, and Bluehost are some renowned domain registrars from where you can purchase a domain name. There are chances that the domain name you are looking for might not be available. In such cases, you can try by making a slight variation in the name or buy from the available options. Domain names are auctioned and sold like any other digital property, so you can also check if the owner of the domain is willing to sell it at a slightly higher price. 

Web Hosting

Web hosting refers to the service that provides storage and computing resources to websites on the internet. All your rental website’s files and other data are stored on your hosting provider’s server.  So it’s crucial to choose a web hosting service that is fast, secure, and reliable. There are various types of web hosting services that you can choose depending on the traffic, storage, and other resources your business requires. Some of the renowned web-hosting providers are GoDaddy, Bluehost, Namecheap, and Siteground.

Build The Rental Website

The next step is to build a website for your rental business that makes it easier for you to streamline your operations and also deliver a seamless user experience to the customers. This step can be a struggle if you are a non-technical person and have no prior experience in handling and building websites.

Further, when building a completely new website for your business, speed, security, reliability, and usability are major factors that should be considered. There are multiple options available on the internet, which can help you in building a rental website. These include drag-and-drop page builders, ready-made rental solutions, and custom-development. 

• Drag & Drop Page Builders: This option is probably the easiest way to create a rental website within hours. The page builders come with pre-designed templates that business owners can edit as per requirements. The websites created using page builders are easy to create, require no coding skills, are often cost-effective, and can be built for free too. Since the complete process of website development is limited to templates, it can sometimes restrict the user experience and even miss out on the functionalities that an efficient rental website should offer.

• Ready-Made Rental Solutions: Ready-made rental solutions are dedicatedly built for rental businesses after taking into consideration the requirements of the businesses. They come equipped with modules to manage orders, inventories, analytics, accounts, and so on. But, if you are opting for this method, then it is critical to select an efficient online rental software. 

• Custom Development: A rental website can be custom-built by a web development company for your specific business needs.  Using this approach, you hire a web development company and share your business requirements with their sales team. Post analysis, the team comes up with a proof of concept to develop the website. Though a custom-built website caters to all the requirements of your rental business, it takes a lot of time (6-10 months) and is quite expensive. 

After you are done creating your website, it is time to make it live on the internet. Once deployed, you can start with the process of onboarding customers. It can be hectic in the initial stages as it takes time in creating awareness among the target audience. So you can take different marketing approaches for the same. These include:

• Paid Ads
• Organic Marketing 

Further,  you can enhance the user experience by collecting the feedback from the website visitors.

The  Way Forward

Creating a rental website from grass root level can be a task with a lot of technical hurdles. This becomes more unpleasant when you have no prior technical experience in handling websites. Hence, you can choose any of the above-mentioned options to create an online rental business. Further, you can connect with us at FATbit Technologies as we have years of industry experience in powering rental websites through our product Yo!Rent. 

The ready-made software solution comes with dedicated modules for all types of business operations including inventory management, agreement management, advance security deposit, payment gateway integrations, product inspection, and many more. Several rental niches including equipment, clothing, adventure gear, mobility equipment, and so on can be catered to by it. Also, Yo!Rent is available at a one-time cost for a lifetime license.