Product update: Online store improvements and better performance

The product development announcements have had a bit longer release cycle during the past couple of months. However, it doesn't mean that nothing is happening at our HQ. Actually, it is very much the opposite. There are two reasons for the more conservative release cycle lately:

Many of our customers have their most important sales season during the winter months. Therefore, we have prioritized stability and reliability over publishing new features.
Related to the first point, we have made significant improvements to performance, stability, and reliability. These things are not as visible for the users as e.g., new features but still have a huge impact on the user experience, especially in the long run.

Despite all the above, there is still quite a list of features that we'd like to announce.

Rent again -option to expired rentals

The purpose of this feature is to speed up the process where a customer wants to continue the reservation immediately after the initial return time or wants to make the same booking for the next day.

If only part of the group wants to continue the rental, it is possible to select the individual shoppers from the original reservation and drop out the shoppers who are not included in the new reservation.

rent-again

Segments in the online shop

Online shop now supports segment-based pricing. For example, many shops offer discounted prices for specific customer segments (e.g., students). Previously Twice has supported "segment-based pricing" with only in-store rentals.

Note: Twiceis not responsible for confirming if the customer has the right to the discount.

online-customer-segment

Early pick-ups

Many times, when customers have reserved equipment for the next morning, they would like to pick up the gear already in the previous evening so that they get to the planned activity first thing in the morning.

From the shop's point of view, this is also an excellent way to manage the workload since there are usually more employees available to prepare equipment in the evening compared to the peak hours in the morning.

Previously, if the rental shop started a rental when the "hand-out" happened (e.g., at 18:00) the previous evening, the start and return time were automatically adjusted by Twice. Because of this, the return time was often not what it should.

Now shops can overwrite the automatic starting time adjustment made by Twice and preset the starting time to be fixed to follow the original starting time in the reservation.

Opening hours per location

If a chain has multiple shop locations with different opening hours, they are now able to define the opening hours by location. If the opening hours are not defined by location, every shop will use the primary location's opening hours by default.

opening-hours-location

Support for multi-device operations on the single rental view

To better support rental shops that serve big groups, we have improved the ability to prepare rentals at multiple workstations. Previously Twice had a five-second delay in autosaving, which has made the simultaneous preparation of the same reservation sub-optimal, as the changes from one user overwrite the changes from another user that is working on the same rental.

Now that the delay is removed, shops can operate with multiple workstations, all preparing the same (big) order simultaneously. The inputted info is saved in real-time and also shows a notification if a device goes offline. The employees can continue editing/starting/ending rentals offline, and when the network is back online, Twice will sync all the updates made while the computer is offline.

multi-device-support