How to create a package product
Bundling up products for rental has a number of advantages:
- It allows customers to rent more than one item at a time
- With a single package, you are able to offer an entire set of items that is perfectly tailored to their customer's needs
- It saves time and effort for you as a manager
Example: Ski rentals may include skis, boots, helmets and sticks, while bike rentals may include a bike, helmet and GPS or other accessories.
This eliminates the need for customers to purchase or rent all of these items separately and ensures they have everything they need in order to enjoy their activity safely and fully. This will improve customer satisfaction and additionally when items are bundled in a package deal, you can often secure more sales because your customers get all in one package.
The setup will involve three steps:
- Create the package product
- Create or prepare the add-on subproducts (accessories, consumables or other products)
- Associate the add-on products to the main product
Step 1: Create the package product
Follow the instructions in article How do I create a product? to set up all required product properties: name, description, multimedia, pricing, inventory, etc.
For packages with variants: If your package will include variants or subproducts which have variants, please enable the Variants feature from the Variants section of the package product:
Pricing note: The price of the package covers the price of the individual subproducts with type Included (see more on how to select this type under step 3 below). For setting up an advance pricing scheme click here
Availability note: If your package includes subproducts which in turn are again packages, then the 2nd level availability for the "subproducts of the subproducts" is not checked at this moment.
Step 2: Create the package add-ons or subproducts
These can be: rental accessories, consumables or other products.
Accessory behaviour. If you want your subproducts to not be booked alone but just together with other products, then you have two options:
- Creating them as accessories. These products cannot be rented or bought alone. Please follow this help article to achieve this: How to create an accessory or consumable?
- Creating them as products which are hidden in the Webshop. They can be rented or sold alone from Admin. To achieve this check this help article
If you want your subproduct to also be rented or sold alone, then simply follow the normal steps for creating a product: How do I create a product?
Step 3: Associate the add-ons or subproducts
Go to the Admin Product page for your main package product. Scroll down, expand the Product options section and open the Package and add-ons subsection:
Click Create to add a a new entry. Search all the existing available products in the drop-down menu. Choose the product you want to include, with the desired options:
- Units: Enter a quantity for the number of subproduct items to be associated (the default is 1)
- Type
Recommended: The customer will see the product as a suggested accessory on the Webshop which will have a price displayed.
Note: subproducts with variants are not supported with this option
Included: The product will be included in the booking and the user will not pay anything extra.
This is suitable for packages. The subproduct inventory will be reserved. The included product is displayed on the "More details" section on the product page:
Note: subproduct variants are supported with this option. The user will be shown the variant options to pick for each such subproduct.
- In web-shop: Select the webshop behaviour that you prefer, if a Recommeneded type is selected:
- Optional: The user can choose it freely
- Pre-selected: The subproduct will be pre-selected, but the user can choose to deselect it
- Mandatory: The subproduct will be selected and the user cannot deselect it
Package group: Only relevant for packages with variants (see more below)
For packages with variants
If any of your subproducts included has variants, first make sure that Variants are enabled for your package (see note For packages with variants in step 1).
You should see the variant options of any included subproducts in the Variants section.
You can enter the brand name or other custom name for the options shown to the user
Eg. Highlight the technology name if multiple type of boots are included in a ski package
You can change the display order of user choices (via vertical drag & drop)
Eg. Show ski choices before boot choices for the user
Grouping the subproducts: This is only relevant for packages with more than one subproduct which has variants:
- Example: a package with several brands of boots, from which the user can choose only 1 item
- Setting the same Package group value (Example: "boot") for multiple entries will ensure the user can only pick 1 product from all subproducts using that value
Now your package is ready to be rented!
Important notes
The inventory of the package is dictated by the inventories of the individual products that make up the package. So the inventory for the package may show without a number in stock