Hiring out wheelchairs, mobility scooters, hospital beds, hoists and rehabilitation equipment is not the same business as hiring out party chairs. The same chair goes to a different person every week, it has to be cleaned and checked between them, it carries a serial number somebody may have to trace years later, and the hire period usually ends when a patient recovers rather than on the date written at the counter. Sales Igniter is self-hosted medical and mobility equipment rental software that models all four of those facts, running on your own WooCommerce or Magento 2 site with no per-booking commission and no monthly SaaS fee.
What Makes Medical and Mobility Hire Different
Most booking plugins were written for tours, rooms or appointments. They assume an interchangeable pool of stock and a fixed return date. Home medical equipment and mobility hire breaks both assumptions on day one:
- Individual assets, not a quantity. If a hoist is recalled or a scooter battery fails, you need to know which unit went to which customer and when — not that “four were out that week”.
- Cleaning and decontamination sit between hires. An item coming back today is not available tomorrow, and the calendar has to know that before it sells the slot.
- Fit matters. Seat width, user weight limit, hoist safe working load and bed length are not cosmetic options — booking the wrong one is a safety problem, not a preference.
- Hire periods run open-ended. Post-operative recovery, palliative care and long-term disability hire are billed weekly or monthly and extended repeatedly, not returned on a set date.
- Delivery and setup are part of the product. A hospital bed is delivered, assembled and later dismantled; the customer never comes to your counter.
- Paperwork has to be signed before the equipment leaves. A hire agreement and a liability acknowledgement are standard in this trade.
Track Every Chair, Scooter and Hoist by Serial Number
Sales Igniter supports two inventory models, and medical hire is the clearest case for the second. Quantity-based stock treats twelve identical crutch pairs as a pool of twelve. Serial-number-based stock treats each unit as its own asset with its own history — which customer had it, on what dates, what was charged, what came back damaged.
For durable medical equipment that distinction is the whole job. When a manufacturer issues a safety notice against a batch, serial tracking turns a frightening afternoon into a database query. It is also what lets you retire a specific unit from hire without reducing an abstract stock count, and what makes a per-asset utilisation report meaningful: you can see which scooters earn their keep and which have been sitting in the back since March.
You can mix both models in one catalogue — serial numbers for beds, chairs and scooters, simple quantities for crutches, commodes and consumable accessories. See the full rental system feature list for how the inventory engine handles each.
Build Cleaning and Turnaround Time Into the Calendar
Infection control is the constraint that catches most generic booking plugins out. Sales Igniter lets you set a buffer before and after every hire, per product or as a site-wide default, in hours or days. A commode returning on Friday with a 24-hour decontamination buffer simply is not offered for Saturday — the calendar greys it out automatically rather than relying on staff to remember.
Buffers are per product because the reality is per product: a walking frame may need an hour, a mattress system may need a full day of laundering and testing, and a powered chair may need charging plus a function check. You set the number once and the availability engine respects it on every channel that reads your calendar.
Sizing, Weight Limits and Clinical Variants
Medical equipment is sold on fit. Wheelchairs come in seat widths, scooters in user weight capacities, beds in widths and lengths, hoists in safe working loads. In Sales Igniter these are product variations with their own availability, their own prices and their own stock — so a 22-inch bariatric chair being booked out does not make the 16-inch chair look unavailable, and a customer cannot accidentally reserve a unit rated below their stated requirement.
Because the variants are real inventory rather than dropdown text, the availability calendar answers the question the customer is actually asking: is the size I need free on the dates I need it?
Delivery, Setup and Collection
Very little medical equipment is collected in person. Hire orders carry a delivery address that is frequently not the billing address — a hospital ward, a care home, a relative’s house, a holiday let. Sales Igniter captures the delivery and collection detail on the order, prices delivery as its own charge, and gives your drivers a dated list of what is going out and what is being picked up.
On the Magento 2 side, multi-source inventory maps depots or branches as separate stock locations, so a customer in one region is offered the stock that can actually reach them.
Open-Ended Hire, Weekly and Monthly Billing
“Until they are back on their feet” is a real hire term in this industry. Sales Igniter handles it with recurring hire schedules and subscription billing: a customer takes a bed on a monthly rate, is charged automatically each month against a stored payment method, and the asset stays allocated to them until the hire is ended. Rates can step down over time, so a fourth month costs less than a first, which is how most long-term medical hire is actually priced.
The same subscription engine covers membership schemes — a monthly fee that entitles a care organisation or a member to hold equipment on an ongoing basis, with a queue for items that are currently out.
Deposits, Hire Agreements and Signed Waivers
Refundable damage deposits
Hold a deposit per item or per order, taken at checkout and released automatically after the equipment is checked back in and passed.
Signed hire agreements
The customer signs your rental contract and liability acknowledgement during checkout; a PDF is generated, attached to the order and emailed.
A record you can produce later
Every hire keeps who took which serial-numbered unit, on what terms, with the signed document stored against the order.
Deposits and contract signing are add-ons to the core booking system rather than separate software, so the deposit is calculated on the same order and the agreement is signed in the same checkout the booking was made in.
Servicing, Battery Health and Inspection Records
Mobility scooters have batteries that degrade, hoists and slings carry inspection intervals, and beds have motors that fail. Because stock is tracked per serial number, you can take an individual asset out of the availability pool for service without touching the rest of the fleet, record what was done against that unit, and return it to hire when it passes. Maintenance blocks behave like bookings — the calendar treats a serviced item as unavailable in exactly the same way it treats a hired one.
Check-In, Barcode Scanning and Utilisation
Returns are where hire businesses lose money quietly. Sales Igniter supports scanning an item’s barcode to check it back in, which marks the hire closed, starts the cleaning buffer, and triggers the deposit release. The inventory and utilisation reports then show what is out, what is overdue, and how hard each asset is working — the number that tells you whether to buy another bariatric chair or sell two standard ones.
Run It on WooCommerce or Magento 2 — Same Rental Engine, Your Platform
Sales Igniter Bookings & Tours — the WooCommerce medical equipment rental plugin
The right fit for most mobility shops and home medical equipment dealers. If your site is already WordPress, this turns it into a hire system without rebuilding the storefront you have already paid for.
- Sell and hire from one WooCommerce catalogue — consumables and accessories alongside the rental fleet.
- Serial-numbered chairs, scooters, beds and hoists, each with its own hire history and service record.
- Decontamination buffers after every hire, set per product in hours or days.
- Seat widths, weight capacities and safe working loads as real variations with their own stock.
- PDF hire agreements and liability waivers signed at checkout, plus refundable damage deposits.
- Recurring weekly or monthly billing for long-term recovery and care hire.
Sales Igniter — the Magento 2 medical equipment hire extension
For larger operations on Adobe Commerce or Magento Open Source — multi-branch fleets, contract hire and care-provider accounts.
- Multi-source inventory maps depots and branches, so customers see stock that can actually reach them.
- B2B account pricing for care homes, hospitals and insurers, with negotiated rate cards.
- Request-for-quote handling for contract and tender hire rather than card checkout.
- The same serial tracking, cleaning buffers, deposits and signed agreements as the WooCommerce build.
- Multi-store and multi-language for operations running several regions or brands.
Not sure which platform fits? Our Magento versus WooCommerce comparison for booking and rental businesses sets out the trade-offs honestly — we sell both, so the choice is yours to make on merit.
Setting Up Medical Equipment Rental Bookings, Step by Step
1. Choose quantity or serial tracking per product
Beds, chairs, scooters and hoists get serial numbers. Crutches, frames and commodes can stay on simple quantities. You can change your mind later without rebuilding the catalogue.
2. Put an availability calendar on the product page
Customers pick a start date and either an end date or a hire length. The calendar shows genuine availability for the exact size and specification they selected.
3. Set the decontamination buffer
Add the cleaning and testing time after each hire, per product. The engine removes those days from sale automatically.
4. Price by day, week, month or a stepped long-term rate
Set daily rates for short recovery hires and discounted weekly or monthly rates for long-term care, with the rate chosen automatically from the hire length.
5. Add the deposit and the hire agreement
Attach a refundable deposit and require the customer to sign your contract and liability wording before the order can be placed.
6. Check equipment back in and release the deposit
Scan the item in, record its condition, and let the system close the hire, start the cleaning window and return the deposit.
Who This Suits
- Home medical equipment and durable medical equipment dealers adding online hire to a retail catalogue
- Mobility shops hiring wheelchairs, powerchairs, rollators and scooters by the day or week
- Post-operative and rehabilitation hire — beds, hoists, pressure-relief mattresses, knee walkers
- Holiday and travel mobility hire delivering to hotels, cruise terminals, resorts and holiday lets
- Care homes and providers running internal equipment libraries with membership or department billing
- Event and venue accessibility hire supplying chairs and scooters for the duration of an event
Medical Equipment Rental Software FAQs
1Can I track each wheelchair or bed by its own serial number?
2How do I stop equipment being re-booked before it has been cleaned?
3Can customers hire on an open-ended or monthly basis?
4Can I make customers sign a hire agreement and liability waiver?
5Does it handle sizes and weight capacities properly?
6Is my customer data stored on someone else’s servers?
See It Running Before You Buy
The quickest way to judge whether this fits your fleet is to book something on a live install. Our free live rental software demo lets you place a hire, see the calendar block the dates, watch the turnaround buffer apply and follow the order through the admin — no sales call first.
If you would like the equipment catalogue, delivery rounds and hire paperwork configured for you, we also take on custom rental website builds.