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Product update: Choose between renting and selling your products

4 min read

The wait is finally over. We're over the moon to announce that Twice now seamlessly supports renting and selling products. This allows you to innovate and design new services combining the best of both worlds. Continue reading to learn more about selling products and other recently published product updates.

What's new

Selling of products

sell-products

We have long envisioned an e-commerce platform enabling flexible commerce for both merchants and consumers. Renting, buying, and someday in the future subscribing to products in a single checkout.

Enabling product and service sales has been a long time in the making. The version we just published supports basic sales situations well. For example, selling used equipment when it's time to renew your rental fleet or selling additional products and services with product rentals.

Already in the following product updates, there will be improvements to the current version.

A brief summary of what's new

  • In the Product Settings, you can now define a sales price for a product (or a service) and mark whether the product is for rent, sale, or both.

  • In the Inventory, you can define how many articles of a given SKU are available for rent and how many are for sale. In the first version, a single article can only be for rent or sale. So, for example, if you have ten bikes, three of which are for sale, you can have a maximum of seven cycles for rent. In future updates, we will allow you to put a single article for both rent and sale.

  • Bookings view got renamed as Orders, and there's a new tab, 'Pending'. The 'Pending' tab is dedicated to orders that include only products sold. On this tab, you'll see all sales orders you have not yet fulfilled (given to the customer). Bookings, which include rentals, will be visible on the 'Upcoming' and 'Active' tabs, as before.

  • Sales orders have their own flow in the SIngle Order view. Instead of starting a sales order, you fulfill one—this will mark the order as completed and the related inventory items as sold. We have also improved the performance and usability of the view for all order types.

  • When a product is available for rent and sale, your customers can select whether they want to rent or buy.

Upcoming updates

As mentioned, the version we released now is just the beginning. We already have improvements waiting in the pipeline, including:

  • Support for shipping and local deliveries.

  • A single article can be available for both renting and selling at the same time.

  • Possibility for merchants to add sales products to orders in the Admin dashboard. Currently, you can only sell products through the online store.

Learn more about selling products in Twice in our knowledge base.

Online store editor

online-store-editor

The online store editor allows you to make simple edits to the layout of your online store.

You can display a separate category page in your online shop or show the entire product catalog in the first view.

A category page adds one more click to the customer's purchase journey. On the other hand, it can improve the user experience for stores with dozens of products in their catalog. Pointing visitors to the product category page they are looking for can avoid confusion and lengthy scrolling.

In addition, the layout of the homepage is customizable. On the desktop, you can show anything between 1-12 image cards per row. On mobile, the number of image cards per row is set to two.

You can also add a featured image, page heading, description, and a CTA on the category page. For example, you can use this section simply for branding purposes or promotional campaigns.

Access the new editor through Settings > Online Store.

Tip: To get more out of your category page, you can create non-product-related categories, such as Most Popular and New Releases.

Learn more on how to edit your online appearance.

Upcoming updates

The online store editor is a Beta feature, meaning we acknowledge it is not a finished product. We have a good bunch of features in the pipeline that we aim to add in chunks in the upcoming product updates.

To let us know what editing options you would like to see, find a banner in the top left corner of the editor, including a link to a feedback form. Use it to help us to help you!

Upcoming features include, among others, more customization options for the About page and Footer.

New table views

table-views

We have been silently releasing this UI update in many places around Twice. The table views allow much more effective handling and editing of data.

You can, for example, filter, sort, and do bulk actions as you want. You can also customize the table views by hiding and rearranging columns that are not relevant to you on a daily basis. Finally, you can export the table data as a CSV and continue working on it, for example, in Excel.

You can find these tables in the following views:

  • Products

  • Product Categories

  • Discounts

  • Pending Orders

  • Completed Orders

  • Inventory SKUs

  • Inventory Articles

  • Marketing List

Improvements and fixes

  • You can now change the order in which your stores are displayed in the online store. You can do this in the Account > Stores settings.

  • We have added a new settings page, Account > Terms & Policies, and moved all related settings there (terms & privacy policy, marketing consent, cancellation policy, etc.).

  • You can now add custom text to payment receipts using an open text field. You can do this in the Account > Terms & Conditions settings.

  • You can now reserve the deposit directly from a customer's payment card in the Single Order view. This feature is helpful in case you are, for example, shipping orders and want to reserve the deposit in advance. Or if the deposit reservation has failed and you want to try the reservation again. If the deposit reservation attempt fails, the status shown in the order view stays 'Unreserved'.

  • We have fixed the issue where a user got an error when adding a new line to a product's fixed start times.

  • We have fixed the issue where invalid characters in product image file names were breaking the image.

Article written by Twice Commerce

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