Features
For Magento 1 please see: Security deposits
For Magento 2 or WooCommerce please see: Security Deposits for Rental Businesses – Tokenized vs Authorization
Yes — and for a true multi-store setup we recommend the Magento 2 version.
A multi-store means you run several storefronts, each with its own domain name, design template, default language and currency, all sharing one installation of our rental software and one inventory pool. For example:
Store 1 | mystore.com | Catalog of cameras
Store 2 | mystore2.com | Catalog of sporting equipment
Why Magento 2 for this
Magento 2 was built with multi-store as a first-class feature, and our rental extension takes advantage of it. If you are running multiple storefronts and multiple inventory locations — separate warehouses, depots, branches or cities that each need to hold and show their own real stock — Magento 2 is the right platform. Its Multi-Source Inventory keeps genuine stock levels per location on one shared booking calendar, so a camera in your London depot is not offered to a booking being collected in Manchester. You also get multi-language and multi-currency storefronts running off a single catalogue.
See our Magento 2 rental booking extension for the full detail, or read about Multi-Source Inventory and multi-store in Magento 2 vs WooCommerce.
What about WordPress / WooCommerce?
WooCommerce does not have multi-store built in the way Magento 2 does. If you want a multi-store or multi-location setup on WooCommerce, we can build it for you as a customization project — this is work we do regularly, and for many businesses it still works out cheaper and quicker than moving to Magento 2. Tell us how many storefronts and inventory locations you need and we will quote it: fill in our custom development request form.
If you are weighing up the two platforms generally, our Magento 2 vs WordPress / WooCommerce comparison covers cost, scale and customization time.
No. WooCommerce sells products that ship and do not come back. It has no concept of a rental period, of an item being unavailable while it is out with a customer, or of that item returning to stock on a given date. Sales Igniter Bookings & Tours adds exactly that: a date-range availability calendar, real rental inventory, turnaround time, deposits and hire agreements, on top of the WooCommerce catalogue and checkout you already know.
Yes. Pricing can be set by the minute, hour, day, week or month, prorated or flat. You can run hourly hire and multi-week hire from the same catalogue, and set fixed-length options (for example 2h, 4h, full day) where that suits the product better than an open date range.
The two terms get used interchangeably, but they solve different problems, and the difference is what decides whether the software still works for you in month three.
A booking plugin books time. It sells a slot in a calendar — an appointment, a table, a class. Once the slot has passed, nothing else has to happen.
A rental plugin sends a physical item out and needs it back. That item is unavailable for the whole hire, not just for an hour. It needs turnaround time before it can go out again. It may need a deposit and a signed agreement. And you need to know which specific unit went where, and whether it came back.
If what you rent comes back, an appointment scheduler runs out of road quickly. Filling that gap is what Sales Igniter Bookings & Tours is for.
Yes. Items can be assigned to locations, and pickup and drop-off are chosen at the time of booking. A one-way hire shows the unit as unavailable at the origin depot and expected at the destination, so both sites see the same accurate picture of what they have.
Yes — this is turnaround (buffer) time, and it is set per product.
Padding applies before and after each booking, so an item returned on Sunday evening is not offered to somebody for Monday morning if it first needs to be cleaned, dried, inspected or serviced. The customer is billed only for the days they actually have the item; the blocked turnaround is invisible to them and simply removes the item from the availability calendar.
Yes, with the rental contract signing add-on. The agreement is generated straight from the booking, with the customer, the item, the dates and your own terms already merged in. The customer signs it on screen, and it is stored as a PDF against that order with a timestamp.
The template is editable, so the excess, mileage limits, damage terms and liability wording that appear are your own — not ours. No printing, scanning or chasing paperwork on the day of collection.
Yes. Delivery and collection can be priced by zone or by distance, and a time window is captured on the order, so the drop and pickup schedule sits on the same calendar as the bookings themselves. Fixed rates, distance-based rates and table rates are all supported, so you can charge a flat fee locally and scale it up for longer runs.
Yes. Bundles and composite products let you sell something like a “Wedding for 150” that contains tables, chairs, linens and glassware as a single purchase, while every component still draws down its own real stock behind the scenes.
You can let customers swap or add components where that makes sense, so the package stays flexible without you losing track of what is actually committed on the date.
Yes, with the Subscriptions & Memberships add-on for WooCommerce. A product can be billed on a repeating cycle — every X hours, days, weeks, months or years — so long-term hire becomes recurring revenue instead of a booking you have to win again every month.
The booking calendar is driven by that billing cycle, so the rental period extends as each renewal is taken and inventory is never released before the customer has paid for the next term. The same add-on also sells membership tiers and runs a rental queue, where returning one item automatically dispatches the next one the customer has lined up.
Yes, if you want them to. You decide which billing intervals you are willing to accept on each product.
Offer more than one and the product page shows a Billing every chooser, so the customer picks weekly, monthly or yearly themselves. Offer exactly one and it is simply fixed, with nothing extra for them to think about.
You can also let the same product be taken either as a one-off hire or as a subscription, and leave that choice to the customer at the point of booking.
The renewal is retried automatically the following day. After three failed attempts the subscription is put on hold rather than quietly lapsing, so it surfaces for you to follow up instead of disappearing.
The customer is emailed each time a payment fails, and can change the card that future renewals will charge from their My Account area. Renewals are charged off-session against the card already on file, through Stripe, Braintree, Authorize.net or PayPal.