Efficiently Manage Vendors on your Online Rental Marketplace with YoRent

Vendors on an online rental marketplace complete the entire value chain and make the business asset-light so that the business owner can generate revenue without owning any inventory. This happens as the owner directly leverages from the vendor’s manufacturing and sourcing expertise to create a powerful value proposition. However, it also makes marketplaces highly reliable on vendors. 

In a sense, the number of vendors on a marketplace resonate with its status and brand value, and also attract customers. But managing hundreds of vendors and their countless products on a marketplace is a challenge itself. While the majority of ecommerce solutions have full capabilities to manage customers, they provide very limited features for vendor management.

On the other hand, Yo!Rent comes with full-fledged vendor management options. Before going on to those options, let’s have a brief look at Yo!Rent multi-vendor workflows.

Table of Contents

• Multi-Vendor Operations Workflow in Yo!Rent
  – Listing and Ordering Process
  – Claiming Reimbursement for Damaged Products
  – Withdrawing Revenue from Wallet
• Vendor Management Features in Yo!Rent
• Conclusion

Multi-Vendor Operations Workflow in YoRent

From listing multi-vendor products to managing rental security and vendor earnings, Yo!Rent is meticulously developed to deliver on these use cases.

Listing and Ordering Process

1. Vendors sign up on the seller registration form and upload detailed listings of their products
2. Customers browse those listings/products and use the booking calendar to see product availability and select their rental dates
3. To place an order, customers have to pay the rental fee along with a security amount.
4. Both the rental fee and security are added to the vendor’s e-wallet
5. The vendor delivers the rented product via the selected delivery method
6. Customer gets the option to inspect the received product before starting the rental period
7. In case of any issues in the product, the customer can report them on the marketplace and request an exchange or refund

Claiming Reimbursement for Damaged Products

– After the customer returns the product, the rental buffer period begins in which the vendor inspects the product for any damages
– In case of any damages, the vendor can claim reimbursement from the customer’s rental security and the remaining amount is returned to the customer
– In case of no damages, the entire rental security is returned to the customer
– After the end of rental buffer period, the product is automatically added back to the inventory
– Buffer period can be used for product refurbishing

Withdrawing Revenue from Wallet

– Once a vendor reaches the withdrawal threshold amount, he can transfer his earnings from his e-wallet to bank account
– In order to be eligible to withdraw balance, the vendor also needs to complete a minimum withdrawal interval period set by the marketplace admin

Vendor Management Features in YoRent

We discussed Yo!Rent’s multi-vendor workflows above. To support those workflows and streamline vendor management, Yo!Rent rental software comes with a plethora of features. Some important ones are mentioned below.

1. Custom Seller Registration Form: Different rental niches require marketplace admin to collect different information from vendors. For example, all B2B and B2C business models require admin to collect current account information but it is not required on P2P rental business models. Similarly, the information can vary for each and every rental niche as well. To support all such requirements, Yo!Rent allows admins to create custom seller registration forms to collect all required information..

2. Separate Seller Registration Form: Certain rental businesses may not require the admin to collect any special information from vendors. A major example of these rental businesses are P2P businesses where the customers can both rent and lend products. In such a scenario, the admin can keep a single registration form for both customers and vendors by unmarking the default “separate seller registration form” option under general settings.

3 Minimum Withdrawal Balance and Interval Period: To deliver a satisfying consumer experience, rental marketplace owners need to have quick payment solutions. They incorporate this by using an e-wallet. For maintaining balance in the e-wallet and listing genuine vendors on their marketplaces, Yo!Rent allows marketplace admins to set a minimum withdrawal balance and interval period.

4. Email Verification: To ensure safe business operations and filter spam registrations, admin can enable email verification. Once enabled, each and every vendor will have to verify their email address in order to list anything on the rental marketplace.

5. Welcome Email: For an enhanced onboarding experience, admins can automate a welcome email for each and every verified vendor. The email can include information such as greetings, company’s vision, vendor policies or even next steps to start selling.

6. Max Seller Request Attempts: To filter spam registrations or limit repetitive registration attempts, marketplace admins can set maximum registration attempts. Once a vendor has exhausted all the attempts, the system will not accept anymore requests from the same email address.

7. Admin Approval Settings: On Yo!Rent, the admin can also mandate approval on various items such as product listings, brands, categories and more. This module helps the admin in filtering incomplete and irrelevant listings. Moreover, the admin also gets the control of products and brands that he wants to display on the marketplace.

8. Rent, Buy and RFQ: To provide complete flexibility in business and ensure scalability, Yo!Rent provides options to rent, buy and request for quotations on a product level. The admin can disable or enable sales and RFQ options for vendors depending on the selected business model, product category and market trends.

9. Mandatory Fields and Custom Fields: Another way admin can ensure complete listings in Yo!Rent is by creating mandatory fields such as product number, brand name and SKUs. He can also create custom fields for each and every product category that vendors need to fill in order to upload a listing. Some examples of custom fields are fuel type for cars, screen size for laptops and loading capacity for trucks.

10. View Order Status and Transaction Records: The admin can also keep tabs on various metrics such as vendor orders, order completion status, payment status, canceled orders, overdue returns, return requests and refund requests. All these metrics provide the admin with a better view of business and vendor performance.

11. Create Featured Shops: To reward top performing vendors or increase booking on top performing products, the admin can set featured shops that are displayed on a highlighted section of the webpage. Other ways the marketplace owner can use this feature is to collaborate with vendors or benefit from paid featured sections.

12. Email Sellers: To simplify communication between vendors and admins and send easy updates, Yo!Rent allows admins to send emails directly from the marketplace platform. This eliminates the process of finding email addresses and using a third-party email service.

13. Vendor Reports: Marketplace admin can also find all vendor performance reports at one place in Yo!Rent. He can view various metrics such as total listings of a vendor, total revenue generated, rented products quantity, refund quantity, refund amount, canceled orders, site commission and even reviews and ratings.

Conclusion

While launching a rental marketplace is an asset-light business, like any other ecommerce business, it requires adequate administration to reap the returns. Managing vendors that provide you the assets is very important on a rental marketplace and Yo!Rent empowers you to not only manage vendors, but also create a holistic business environment for mutual growth. Combined with its marketing features and advanced rent-centric functionalities, Yo!Rent is one of the most advanced online rental software available today that you can use to materialize your rental marketplace ideas.