Late in 2019 Angeles Millwork moved from a dated piece of rental management software called Total Rental onto a more modern and full-featured (read: complex) software from Point-of-Rental called Rental Expert.
One of the selling points of the software, presented at the Do-It-Best marketplace that our CEO attended, was that Rental Expert could integrate with an online platform for making rental reservations. Having not done our due diligence, it turned out to be a seperate product and monthly bill from RentalHosting.com to get a website for rentals.
Rather than going down that route, we decided to roll our own site. The end result is a Node.js-based eCommerce-lite platform. We integrate with the PoR database on the backend for serving content like images (though I cache those for speed), item descriptions, searching, and rates. Site admins are able to modify descriptions, images, and links to attached or external content via a web interface while rate information is sync'd to PoR and modifiable within the software (reflected on the next browser cache purge). The website allows for reservations to be sent off to our rental manager, who can then manually input whatever is needed to setup the reservation within the PoR counter system.
While very likely not as clean or full-featured as the offering by RentalHosting, we're able to get the neccessary features without paying a monthly subscription (besides our existing hosting expenses).
If you're in the Port Angeles area or a little to the west, check out the new rental page at rental.angelesmillwork.com or swing by the store at 1601 South C Street.
If you're here because you have Point-of-Rental software and are interested in making something similar, check out the GitHub page for the rental software here: TODO PUBLISH