WordPress / WooCommerce
Not hard at all — for most people it is a five to ten minute job, and it is the same process as installing any other WordPress plugin.
What you need first
- A working WordPress site
- WooCommerce installed and activated
- Standard WordPress hosting — nothing high-powered required
How to install it
- Download the plugin .zip file from your account area after purchase.
- In your WordPress admin, go to Plugins → Add New → Upload Plugin.
- Choose the .zip file and click Install Now, then Activate.
- Enter your licence key so the site receives updates.
- Open the rental settings and set your calendar type, pricing units and turnaround (buffer) time.
- Edit a product, switch it to a rental product, and set its rental pricing.
That’s it — the booking calendar appears on the product page and your store can take rental bookings. Because the plugin installs into the site you already own, you keep your existing theme, pages, blog and search rankings; there is nothing to migrate and no separate storefront to set up.
Free installation with the Pro version
If you would rather not touch any of it, the Pro package includes free installation and a training session. We install and configure the plugin on your site for you, and then walk you and your team through how to set up rental products, pricing and the booking calendar.
Full setup documentation is in our WooCommerce / WordPress Bookings & Tours knowledge base. If you get stuck, support is included for the first year — just get in touch.
Both are 100% open source and both run the same rental booking engine, so the decision is about your business rather than about features. For most clients we recommend the WordPress / WooCommerce version.
WordPress / WooCommerce — the right choice for most businesses
- Much cheaper and faster to customize. Magento customizations typically take three to five times longer than the equivalent WooCommerce work, and WooCommerce developers are more plentiful and less expensive.
- Runs on ordinary hosting. No high-powered server required, so your hosting bill stays modest.
- Installs into the WordPress site you already own. You keep your theme, your pages, your blog and your search rankings — there is nothing to migrate.
- Quicker to launch. Most stores are taking real bookings within days.
- Drawback: WooCommerce has no built-in multi-store, and a few advanced capabilities (serial number tracking, product maintenance records, per-day inventory availability reporting) are customization work rather than settings.
Magento 2 / Adobe Commerce — the right choice when you scale
- True multi-store and Multi-Source Inventory. Real stock levels per warehouse, depot, branch or city on one shared calendar — the main reason to choose Magento.
- Multi-language and multi-currency storefronts running off a single catalogue and inventory pool.
- Built for very large catalogues and heavy seasonal booking traffic, with B2B account pricing and request-a-quote.
- Serial number tracking, product maintenance and POS are supported natively rather than as customizations.
- Drawbacks: it needs high-powered hosting, it is slower and more expensive to customize, and it takes longer to launch.
The short version
If you run one location and want to be trading quickly at a sensible cost, choose WordPress / WooCommerce. If you are running several depots, countries or storefronts and need each to hold its own real inventory, choose Magento 2.
There is no automatic migration path between the two platforms, so it is worth choosing deliberately. For a full side-by-side breakdown see our Magento vs WordPress / WooCommerce booking solutions comparison, or talk to us and describe your setup — we will tell you honestly which one fits.
Yes. The large majority of WordPress themes work with our rental booking plugin out of the box. Included with support/updates is up to 1/2 hour of time to help you get your theme working if it doesn’t work straight away.
The reason compatibility is good is that our plugin extends the standard WooCommerce product, cart and checkout templates rather than replacing them. Any theme that follows WooCommerce’s own template standards — which is nearly all of them — will render the rental calendar, pricing and booking fields correctly.
Popular WooCommerce-compatible themes that work well with the rental booking plugin include:
- Astra — lightweight and fast, and what this website runs on
- Kadence
- GeneratePress
- Blocksy
- OceanWP
- Neve
- Storefront — WooCommerce’s own reference theme
- Commercial ThemeForest themes such as Flatsome, WoodMart and Divi
Theme issues that may occasionally need extra time:
1) AJAX add-to-cart that bypasses the standard WooCommerce add-to-cart flow. This can usually be switched off in the theme settings, and many implementations already work with no changes.
2) Page-builder product templates (Elementor, Divi, WPBakery) that output a hardcoded product price instead of calling WooCommerce’s own price functions. Rental prices are calculated, so a hardcoded price field will show the wrong figure until the template is pointed at the correct function.
3) Themes that replace the default WooCommerce single-product template rather than extending it. This is poor practice and most themes do not do it, but if yours does it may need some customization time.
If your theme needs work beyond the included 1/2 hour we can quote for it — see our custom development request form. If we find any themes that are genuinely incompatible because of how they are coded, we will list them here.
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.
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, 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.