What we shipped: 15 new features and counting

In the last couple of weeks, we released a new logo and design to make Booqable more consistent and more recognizable. With this fresh look and feel, we figured it’s the perfect moment to share some recent developments and look back at what we released in the past year.

Instead of making this all about us, we want to first thank our customers for the ongoing support for our product and company. Last year has been a year of significant change and growth for us, which couldn’t have happened without the people who use, recommend, and leave feedback on Booqable. We’ve also spoken to many, many customers, and carefully observed how they use our rental software during their daily operations.

But we didn’t just chat with current customers. We also listened to the people for whom Booqable wasn’t a good enough fit. These conversations were valuable as they gave us the insights we needed to map out which features to add, and which parts of the product needed to be revised and improved. After speaking to hundreds of people among several rental industries, we constructed an exciting roadmap for this year.

What we released in one year

With a clear path ahead, let’s look back at what we shipped so far. In 2018, we published over 70 updates, ranging from small improvements to large features, all making Booqable more complete and more customizable. We’ve bundled some of the highlights:

Make payments quick and easy with our PayPal integration

Let your customers use their credit card or PayPal to pay online by connecting Booqable to your PayPal account. Apart from accepting payments online, you can also use the integration to request payments from your customers using the Booqable admin.

Take advantage of more payment gateways

You were already able to accept all major credit cards by integrating Booqable with Stripe, but now you can take it one step further and allow your customers to pay with iDEAL, Giropay, Bancontact, Alipay, EPS, and P24. Just so you know, the integration still enables you to charge credit cards, authorize holds, and request payments from your customers.

Accept full or partial payments

Gain complete control over what your customers need to pay when placing orders online. You can require payment of the full order amount, part of the order amount, and even decide whether a damage deposit is due at checkout or a later stage. With partial payments enabled, you charge the remaining amount at pickup, or at any time by sending out a payment request.

Store credit cards on file

Safely store payment information for regulars and online transactions, making payments faster and more seamless for you and your customers.

Edit payments on orders and invoices

When you’ve accidentally mapped a payment you accepted outside of Booqable to the wrong invoice, you can transfer that transaction to a different invoice. Besides, you can adjust the amounts, dates, and methods of manually registered payments.

Store the right data in the right place

Adapt Booqable to your company’s needs by using custom fields. This feature enables you to create persistent input fields for rental orders, products, and customers, which makes them perfect for tracking warehouse locations, event dates, purchase prices, and whatever else that comes to mind. Next, you can display the values on invoices, contracts, quotes, or packing slips to include the right details on your documents. It’s a game-changing feature for new and experienced users, as you can now really make Booqable your own and have relevant data accessible within the right context.

Collect all the information you need at checkout

After creating a custom field, you can use that same input field to collect all the information you need from customers at checkout. All the values your customers enter automatically map to the right place, reducing the number of manual changes you need to make.

Get more flexibility with rental durations

It’s not just the Booqable admin that got more customizable. Apart from the payment updates, we also released many features that make your online store more flexible. It’s now simple to get a grip on the rental periods your customers can choose by defining business hours, fixed rental durations, and time slots. And using Away Mode helps you temporarily block a specific date range when you take some time off, for example.

Prevent last-minute rental bookings

Some rental companies love last-minute reservations. Others prefer to avoid them as their teams might need time to pack before a client picks up his rental equipment. With Booqable installed on your website, you can prevent customers from ordering at the last minute by requiring a minimum notice for online bookings.

Make rental products easily searchable

After presenting your Booqable products on your website, you can add an embeddable search field so customers can quickly find the items they need, without having to scroll through your entire product list.

Control how customers interact with your website

Initially, the shopping cart was the only place for people to choose a rental period. But for some, a stand-alone date picker (connected to the shopping cart) could provide a more straightforward booking experience. That’s why you now have the option to embed a separate date picker, giving you more control over the place where customers choose a rental period on your website.

Run sales promotions using coupon codes

Providing occasional discounts is a powerful marketing tactic to boost sales and be more competitive. Next time you plan on running a marketing campaign, create discount codes in the Booqable admin. Share them with your customers so they can redeem them at checkout, or manually apply coupons to manually created orders.

Charge for services and consumables

Create services and consumables to charge one-time fees for additional items and services you provide besides your rental equipment. The new product types are perfect for shipping charges, setup costs, and consumable products such as water bottles and gaffer tape.

Measure the performance of your store

Add code snippets to your Booqable checkout to track performance and conversions using services like Google Analytics, Facebook Business, and more.

Use a custom checkout domain

Use your own domain for the checkout of your online store to provide a consistent booking experience for your customers.

Export your performance data

Export your Booqable performance reports to Excel or CSV files. Share them with your accountant, keep them as a backup, or import data into spreadsheets to analyze the results.

And there’s more to come

All of these developments didn’t happen overnight. Thanks to our team, not only the product has grown, but Booqable as a company has grown too. We made important hires across the product team, sales, customer care, and customer success, and moved into a new office to accommodate everyone. We can’t wait to use this space to continue working on Booqable and share even more things with you over the rest of the year. Keep an eye on your inbox and changelog!

If you haven’t tried Booqable before, or haven’t checked it out in a while, we encourage you to start a new trial and take another look. You’ll find new features that can help your work more efficiently, acquire more customers, and make your working life less frustrating as your business starts to grow.

If you use Booqable already, we’d love to hear from you. What do you think of the new features? And what would you like to see in the future? Let us know by starting a chat using the messenger in your Booqable account. As you know, we’re always open to feedback!