Product Bundles & Store Views Support Now Available

Our rental system software now includes support for product bundles and store views in Magento.

Product bundles means you can rent several products together at the same time and the inventory and everything is correctly checked for availability and checked out all at once. You might have a camera kit that includes a camera, 3 lenses, and 2 light stands. Or you could rent a Projector kit that includes the projector, speakers, and the screen. There are a lot of uses for this feature.

Store views support means that you can run multi-store setup in Magento and use our rental system to run different rental products on each store, or the same ones it's up to you. You can also configure different pricing per store.

Magento List All Categories & IDs for Import/Export

Magento for some reason doesn't have a page showing all your categories and id numbers which can be a pain if you are trying to to data entry for a import/export spreadsheet. We made a quick little php page that you can upload to your main directory to list them all out for you. Here it is: Magento Categories List File

Why We Moved Our Rental E-commerce System To Magento

History: We do a lot of client projects for E-commerce using our rental e-commerce solution Sales Igniter. We started in 2002 using Oscommerce which was then the go to open source E-commerce system in PHP. We used that for 5 years, but were very disappointed in how the Oscommerce source code was not maintained much, it stayed pretty much the same. Many clients wanted extra features and contributions added to their site, so what we found was that contributions were many times full of bugs and conflicted with one another.

So in 2008 we started off on developing our own E-commerce framework. Our goal was to create something where client customizations could be kept separate from our source code. Because if you are a developer, you know that clients will ask for some pretty crazy stuff and it doesn't make sense to put it into the base. For our new framework we used Doctrine ORM to make it easier to work with the database. We developed our own custom overwrite system so that client code would not interfere with our main rental software framework.

Being a smaller company, we found that it became way too time consuming to maintain our own E-commerce framework. We had also experimented building our own WYSIWYG visual template manager for the design portion of Sales Igniter. This was a big time hole for us as there were some issues with loosing sessions and sometimes the template code getting lost as a template was saved. We began to realize that this was not the way to go and began to investigate other solutions. We considered going to Ruby on Rails and using the Spree shopping cart. We also considered all of the top PHP shopping carts: Prestashop, Magento, Open Cart, Tomato Cart, CS Cart, and Virtuemart.  http://www.itwebexperts.com/oscommerce_zencart_xcart_comparison.php

The problem was we were spending 95% of our time on maintaining the shopping cart and 5% of our time developing and improving the rental portion which is way out of balance. We were no longer able to run a profitable business because of this imbalance. So though it pained us we knew something had to be done and we’d have to move to another framework. After considering all of these options we decided on Magento for the following reasons:

1. Largest number of available extensions of any of the open source shopping carts for adding things like gift certificates, caching (speed improvement), analytics, advanced customer groups, ebay/amazon integration, points and rewards, design templates and mobile device templates, shipping & payment modules, Social Integrations, and more.

2. Magento has an excellent overwrite system built-in for adding extensions like our rental system. This prevents other modules from interfering with your extension and breaking it when you add others.

3. International Language Support is part of the rails framework. You don't want to know how many hours we spent building onto and enhancing the languages feature in our PHP rental solution. We had it using XML files, translating these dynamically in Google Translate API and then storing these and then built an editor so clients could put in better translations for where Google Translate didn't really do it right. Well that time hole is now gone.

4. Encourages correct coding methods MVC. A problem probably all web development companies run into with their employees is that they get lazy and start hardcoding things, putting code in the wrong directories, and your codebase will start to get junked up. Magento actually makes it easier to code the right way from the start - so your programmers will be encouraged to code the right way from the start.

5. QA & Unit Testing support is built-in. QA is a huge pain. If you add even a simple thing to an app, maybe it will break some obscure thing elsewhere in your system. Well Magento solves that by having a great way to add test code built-in. It doesn't take long to learn how to do and is standard.

6. Excellent cache and index system built-in to the core for great speed. Caching is very important to any modern web app as there are over 10,000 files and huge database arrays which can clog up the cpu of any server no matter how powerful it is if you don’t use proper caching and indexing. 

Please checkout our rental e-commerce shopping cart and see what you think. A free 30 day trial is available. 

Development Update On Magento Rental Module

Free Trial! Signup here: http://rental-e-commerce-software.com/price.php

So here is what our beta has for the Magento Rental Module:

• Minimum and Maximum rental periods
• Difference price points based on minutes, hours, days, weeks, months, or years
• Prorated or non-prorated rentals
• Serial number support for inventory
• Turnover time before and after the rental dates (think of it as padding to allow time for shipping, maintenance, etc before and after the rental)
• Disabled rental dates (can recur) for holidays, store closed, etc
• Time of day support for hourly based rentals
• Send and Return report and Send and Return history report
• Quantity based report showing how much quantity you have in stock by hour, day, week, or month
• Overbooking
• Deposit fee
• Support for all Magento payment and shipping modules

On September 18 we will finish the following features:

• Integration to the Magento admin order creator for rental products
• Finish up support for Configurable rental products (size, color, etc.)
• Tie-in to the Magento shipping management page
• Return rental reminders X time period before rental is due to be returned
• Import/Export support for reservation product info

Here are some of the features we will have in the coming months:

• Google maps support for delivery routes
• Possible inventory centers module

Also our full Rental Queue (membership based rentals like Netflix) will be released on September 27 in beta. It is included free with your Magento rental module license. 

Magento Rental Extension Pay Per Rental Beta Now Available

This is to let you know our Magento rental module pay per rentals version beta is now available. You can view a video of it here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NaDolBVYdvI&feature=youtu.be to see what it does.

Sales Igniter Rental System For Magento Version 1.0 Feature List

So I thought it would now be good to show everyone what our planned 1.0.0 release feature list is shaping up to be. It will be a fairly full-featured cart thanks to the developers at Magento having put so much hard work into their E-commerce system.

We will be offering a beta to all our clients in 2 weeks for you to try it out and decide if you want to switch over. Ya we are pulling 60 - 70 hour work weeks as we are very excited about this new release.

Here is a list of features:

Speed

• Much better loading times on all parts of the rental system

Products

• All the basics like product name, description, multiple images
• Related products
• Product tagging
• Product zoom
• Better product attributes support

Reservations

• Easier to use reservation calendar. All is done from the product info page no separate calendar page now.
• Tier based pricing. You set the price for as many rental periods as you want. The system will chose the appropriate price based on the rental period. 
• FAST LOADING inventory calendar showing how much inventory you have of your reservation products by day
• Ability to set the turnaround time on reservation products. Say you need 3 extra days before and 3 extra days after the reservation to get it ready or for shipping time. 
• BIG IMPROVEMENT - enter inventory as quantity, and optionally use serial numbers for tracking each individual item. Great for large stores that don't want to individually track each inventory item, but adds the flexibility for stores that need to track each individual one. 
• No more complicated configurations. There will only be a few general settings.
• Checkout & Check-in page with exportable reports to XML, Excel, PDF

Shipping

• USPS, FedEx, UPS, DHL, Flat Rate per order or product, Flat rate percent based, Flat rate mixed

Payment Modules

• Huge built-in list of payment modules, very little configuration needed just the username and transaction key
• List: Authorize.net, Beanstream, Braintree, Eway, Samurai, Stripe, Linkpoint, Pay Pal Website Payments Pro, Protx, Skrillr/Moneybookers, USA ePay, 

Checkout

• Loads much faster, and allows guest checkout
• Much cleaner, great looking layout

Rental Memberships

• Ability to setup rental memberships
• Recurring billing is built-in
• Rental queue management using drag and drop instead of having to manually type priority numbers
• Send & Return page with exportable reports to XML, Excel, PDF
• Potential for box sets support - this may get pushed to version 1.1

Admin Order Creator & Editor (POS)

• Very stable and easy to use admin based order creator and editor

International Support For Languages

• A big improvement over our current version - there are over 25 language packs available for download so no more reliance on setting up a google translate api key, most of the translation work is done for you
• There is also support for languages in the database

Social Networks & Facebook/Twitter Login

• Facebook and Twitter logins
• Like & Tweet buttons
• Mail Chimp
• Your customers will like not having to create another account, Facebook login saves them time. Also allows for future marketing opportunities

Coupons, Promotions, Wishlists, and Gift Certificates

• Greatly improved system that has flexible rules and setup
• Flat percent, flat rate per item, flat rate per order, flexible rate, and or free shipping
• Rules based such as based on item total, products, for specific users, on first order, or user has to be logged in
• Built-in wishlist system

Other Great Extras

• Affiliates/Referrals
• Google Base
• Spreadsheet product upload
• CMS
• Blog

So Will Note Make It To The 1.0 Release?

• Multi-inventory center
• Streaming & Downloads
• Product royalties

Sales Igniter Rental System for Magento

Sales Igniter Rental System To Be Released For Magento

Exciting news! After analyzing the current E-commerce solutions we have decided to build Sales Igniter for Magento. We are making rapid progress and expect it be ready in 2 - 4 weeks. What factors did we take into account while doing our analysis of what shopping cart to move Sales Igniter to? We weighted heavily the following:

1. How many people currently use the shopping cart
2. How well supported the base code is
3. If the cart exports to popular accounting packages like QuickBooks
4. How clean the code base is
5. If it has a admin based order creator and editor built-in
6. What templating system it uses
7. How much documentation is available
8. How fast the shopping cart runs on a typical web server

We thought about releasing Sales Igniter 5 years ago on Magento but decided not to as Magento at that time ran very slow, and there was very little good training materials and documentation available for it. Magento has since that time grown exponentially and solved both of these issues.

Magento Demo: http://www.magentocommerce.com/demo
Our Shopping Cart Comparison Page: Link

How Much Is It Going To Cost?

We are going to release both the Magento and E-commerce versions of Sales Igniter for around $500. If anyone has purchased Sales Igniter in the past month at the higher pricing we will refund the extra amount that you paid once we release Sales Igniter for Magento and Open Cart.