E-commerce for on-line rentals

Specific features of the cart for rental stores

Date: Dec-2006 (Revised)

A small hotel decides to implement an online booking system; the company who designed its web site recommends installing a Shopping Cart.

The e-commerce channel is ready in a week, and at the beginning of the season the hotel launches an ad campaign in Google AdWords to increase traffic. Visitors start rolling in, lured by the great rates and the possibility to book and pay online, with no need to stand in line or personally contact a travel agency.

Very soon the trouble starts: the shopping cart records unpaid orders and the employee in charge of the site books rooms based on these orders. Some orders are never paid and rooms remain empty during part of the season. In addition, other reservations for certain rooms are made by phone, and this information is not available to be added online, so other rooms are overbooked. To top it off, the shopping cart does not allow disabling of intermediate steps such as shipping quoting and information, so many visitors decide not to book after all.

At the end of the season the hotel owners start doing their math and realize that the Google campaign and implementation expenses together with the losses from overbooked or empty rooms have produced negative results for the season.

After a meeting with the design company the owners conclude that the origin of their problems lay in their wrong choice of Shopping Cart. The specifications didn't mention the possibility of setting up Rental-Products, therefore room reservations had been published just like tangible goods, independent from time frames and reservations made from other sources.

Comersus 5 includes Rental-Products and all necessary features to implement a successful online rental system.

In Comersus, added products can be defined as a Rental Product, and they will be displayed in a format independent from the rest of the catalog.

Firstly, when clicking on the product details it is impossible to add to cart without first adding a reservation beginning and end date. The selection is carried out with a simple graphic calendar. The user's selection is then compared against the reservation database for that item, and add to cart is only allowed if the selected period is available. The order total is calculated automatically as the item's unit price times the number of days booked.

Reservation problems are avoided by recording orders only after payment, which can be online or offline. In the first case the reservation is recorded with credit card authorization. In the second case, with a wire transfer for example, an employee confirms the deposit and then marks from BackOffice+ that the payment has been received. Only then the reservation is finally recorded.

If another paid reservation has been made during this procedure, the store owners are duly notified to re-plan the pending reservation.

BackOffice+ supports the creation of several administrator profiles with different permissions so that employees in charge of phone reservations can consult existing online reservations and enter orders manually in order to keep a unified reservation database.

Where it's necessary to use an external reservation system, Comersus can be customized to export orders to be unified with reservations in the other system. The same applies to the opposite procedure, that is importing from the external system into Comersus.

In conclusion: Comersus 5 supports the rental of hotel rooms, DVDs, CDs and books among others. It is no longer necessary to purchase expensive tools and hire commission-based reservation systems. And you shouldn't settle for a Shopping Cart which is not prepared to handle rentals.

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