Major Challenges Faced by Businesses While Starting An Online Rental Platform

Online rental businesses have skyrocketed in their demand thanks to the dynamic consumer habits that favor rental options over the purchase of goods/services. Airbnb has a marvelous contribution to the same, a peer-to-peer website with the option to avail of rental spaces and explore foreign cultures like a local. After Airbnb, there was an influx of flurry of websites offering rental options from everything ranging from home and office furniture, construction equipment, textbooks, and travel gears to dresses and musical instruments.

The Emergence of Rental Economy –Propitious Sustainability & Economical Usage. 

Being a beneficial option for the users, rental platforms enjoys massive popularity, and users always seek reliable platforms with good renting options. To modern consumers, it makes more sense to rent expensive or infrequently used items. Moreover, the owners of such items make a huge amount of money by renting their products. It’s a platform that caters to the needs of both renters and rentees, thus it is turning out to be a viable business model.

If considered from a macro level, renting de-escalates the stress on resources as a single item is circulated to address many people’s needs over its lifetime. If you have been considering making an online rental business, then this is the high time. 

To get more understanding of this realm, let us first understand the challenges you may have to face and how to solve these problems.

Stumbling Blocks Faced by Entrepreneurs When Starting an Online Rental Business. 

At Elephy Tech, we have developed several marketplace platforms for a wide array of businesses. As per our experience, we have narrowed down the significant challenges in setting up an online rental marketplace. 

1. Getting a Business Licence

The Challenge:  State or federal agencies often regulate businesses. This permits entrepreneurs to perform legal business operations using specific geographical jurisdictions of the respective governing body. However, getting a business license is a problem. The entrepreneurs may have less knowledge about licensing process or other aspects.

Solution: An accurate approach would be to rely on government websites. The cost of the license may vary depending upon the location and you may also need to buy separate licenses for running your business in a separate jurisdiction.

2. Select The Right Hosting Service Partner

The Challenge: Online businesses need a website, which comes with hosting and a server. Though there are many businesses that self-host their website, however, for non-technology businesses, self-hosting does not come as a viable option. This is especially true for startups. 

Solution: 

There are several hosts which offer different kinds of servers at varying rates. The most popular ones are Linux and Windows servers. However, a considerable number of them have their plan sorted for personal websites, businesses, and blog sites. Their business plans usually incorporate SSL certificates, anti-malware software, and many other features. 

3. Deciding On Website Development Method

The Challenge: Two prominent methods exists to build your rental marketplace. The first one is custom development from scratch, which is not a feasible option for people who have less technical knowledge. The other one is readymade solutions that either have the option for a one-time payment or as a SaaS. 

Solution: In case you want absolute control over the marketplace and want to take no stress about the terms and conditions of the SaaS provider then better go with a readymade white label solution. 

4. Delineating Custom Functionality

The Challenge:  If you have a limited capital then that hinders the customization of the major and unique features in a marketplace. Often, entrepreneurs have to go through many complexities as unique customization comes with much costs. Prolonged hours of logic defining, coding and testing may require redevelopment that ramps up the cots. Thus, entrepreneurs face indecisiveness while they select the added functionality required in the end product. 

Solution: Make sure you reach out to a subject-matter expert, a web development company having experience in building eCommerce solutions. They will provide you with estimated costs so that you are prepared beforehand. 

5. Going with the Ideal Pricing Model

The Challenge: Most of the time there will be shortcomings in the demand and supply in a marketplace. Additionally, the outer economic forces can disturb the whole demand and supply chain. Therefore, there’s a need to have a pricing mechanism that considers different factors. 

Solution: The three most reliable ways to provide contingent pricing are as follows:

• Online Auctions
• Automated Pricing Algorithms or Surge Pricing
• Letting sellers adjust prices in real-time

How Elephy Tech’s Online Rental Marketplace Cater to the Challenges?

Look below how Elephy Tech caters to the problems that startups face in the online rental industry. 

• The Ideal Solution to Have a Good Start in the Rental Economy: 

We provide solutions considering several online rental businesses. Hence, we have a wide array of features to support various niches of the rental economy such as furniture rental, heavy equipment rental, vehicle rental, etc. 

• Fully Customizable Solution: 

We have fully customizable software, which means that from the homepage to the FAQ section, you will be able to give a personalized appearance to every section of your website. Our platform also favors third-party integrations such as MailChimp, ShipStation, and QuickBooks. Our team can develop completely new features for your platform. 

• Scalable Platform: 

Our platforms feature multiple vendors, products, user accounts, sub-admin accounts, reports, and invoices. It is completely scalable as per your business needs and grows your business. 

• Documentation and Support:

 Elephy Tech’s rental platform helps entrepreneurs with the onboarding process that contains in-depth documentation. We also offer free technical support to ascertain smooth eCommerce operations for your business. 

• Ample Marketing Features:

Startups can opt for the several marketing features in rental software to market their eCommerce website and enhance their online presence. Our platform is equipped with dedicated features for SEO and supports social media API integration. 

• Effective User Journey: With an engaging UI and UX, the user journey is quite streamlined. The navigation is simple and it’s quite easy to browse different products, start research, search for cart, and to make payments. We have simplified the whole process in the rental business model to help entrepreneurs in giving accurate quotations and pricing to the customers. 

The Final Words

Challenges are commonplace in the development process. But having a reliable and experienced partner can make all the difference. If you have any such idea of having a robust rental platform then at Elephy Tech, mobile app development company in Australia,  you can experience all the differences by collaborating with talented, gifted, and experienced developers.