Who Built the Equipment Rental Website United Rentals?

United Rentals is the world’s leading equipment rental website headquartered in the US. Operational in over 1500 locations around the globe, United Rentals website caters to the diverse heavy equipment rental requirements of large enterprises, private construction firms, government agencies, small businesses, and even independent contractors. The company has helped in the fulfillment of massive construction projects, be it formidable buildings, skyscrapers, public infrastructure or monuments.

Founded in 1997 by Brad Jacobs, today, United Rentals has a market share of $15.45 billion. The success of United Rentals has encouraged other entrepreneurs to step into the heavy equipment industry with their own equipment rental business. Many of them also launched full-fledged equipment rental websites with direct booking functionality to compete with United Rentals. However, building an online rental website is quite challenging because of the major difference in sales and rental workflows. 

For instance, in the rental business, customers first need to enter their rental dates, provide verification documents, and even submit a rental security deposit. Based on these inputs, the rental invoicing feature generates an invoice. Additionally, use cases, such as late returns and tiered pricing are also present in a rental business. Let us understand how you can build a rental website by taking a reference from United Rentals. In this blog, we will cover United Rentals’ working, business proposition, and technological base in more detail. 

How Does United Rentals Website Work?

To streamline its business operations, United Rentals uses a highly advanced website with a direct checkout option. The website automates the burden of manually providing price quotes, generating invoices, and processing orders. In return, United Rentals’ customers are assured of a more convenient and effortless rental experience.

Booking Workflow of United Rentals Website

Step 1: Users visit the United Rentals website and select a product category.

Step 2: They enter their location and preferred rental dates

Step 3: Users browse the equipment and add the selected equipment to their cart

Step 4: Users visit the cart and select an insurance plan before proceeding to checkout

Step 5: On the checkout page, users add all essential details, such as job site address, billing information, etc, and complete the payment

Step 6: For pickup and return purposes, United Rentals provides both drop-off and pickup services.

Key Value Proposition and Revenue Generation of United Rental

United Rentals primarily deals in the rent and sale of new and pre-owned equipment. The diverse fleet of United Rentals ranges from heavy equipment, aerial work equipment, and material handling equipment (MHE) to power generators, HVAC equipment, and specialty equipment. Furthermore, to help contractors manage and track the progress of construction projects, United Rentals has also launched its own worksite management solutions. These solutions include desktop software and mobile apps with real-time inputs to track work progress and help contractors in fleet management. 

Additionally, below are some revenue generation streams on which United Rental relies to stabilize and diversify its income:

• Rent and sale of heavy equipment
• Sale of pre-owned equipment
• Deals in specialty equipment
• Sale of worksite management software
• Contractor services
• Training services
• Strategic acquisitions 

Technologies Used to Develop the United Rentals Website

There are several methods to develop a website, such as custom programming, using a page builder, or readymade rental software. Due to the diverse solutions available in the market today, it is difficult to accurately identify United Rentals’ software solution. There also remains a huge possibility that United Rentals is a custom-developed website with the company having an in-house team of developers. Nevertheless, with the help of modern tools, we can figure out United Rentals’ tech stack. 

As per BuiltWith.com and W3Techs, the United Rentals website is developed using the following technologies:

Programming Languages	JavaScript, PHP, ASP.NET
Web Frameworks	Java EE (Enterprise Edition), Vue, React
Content Management Systems	Drupal, Publitas
Front-End Tools and Libraries	Ajax, JQuery
Cloud and Infrastructure Services	Amazon AWS EC2, Cloudflare CDN
Web Servers	Apache
Protocols and Integration	DAV (Distributed Authoring and Versioning)
ERP	Rentalman

Features Required to Build a Website Like United Rentals

United Rentals is a comprehensive website, inclusive of multiple features and functionalities. Building so many features can take time, and may require you to customize some software solutions. With that being said, there do exist rental software that encompass a wide and diverse set of rent-centric features. 

Some of these features are:

• Booking Calendar: A module that displays equipment availability to customers and accepts rental date inputs from them.
• Tiered Pricing: Customers can have varying requirements. To fulfill their requirements, you should have the option to set daily, weekly, and monthly rental pricing.
• Document Verification: In the equipment rental industry, certain documents, such as operating license and job site address are important. Your rental website should have the option to collect and verify them.
• Rental Security Management: To encourage the safe use of rental equipment and reimburse any damages, collecting a rental security amount is a common practice in the rental industry. While United Rentals does not collect any such security, for a startup business, this feature is important.
• Rental Agreement Management: To sanction your terms and conditions, a rental agreement management module along with the online eSign option will help.
• Rental Add-ons: Along with rental equipment, many contractors need machine attachments and operating services. All these can be provided with the help of a rental add-ons module.
• Product Inspection: To ensure contractors with peace of mind, you can offer a product inspection feature that lets customers inform you of any problems with the equipment and place return or replacement requests.
• Maintenance Buffer: After equipment is returned, it needs to go under inspection and maintenance checks. During this period, it cannot be added back to the inventory. By defining a maintenance buffer period, you can easily sync under-maintenance inventory with online inventory.
• Late Returns Management: In case of late returns, rental businesses have to bear missed opportunity costs. These can be prevented by defining late return periods and penalties.
• Late Cancellations Management: Late cancellations also lead to lost order processing costs and missed opportunity costs. These can be recovered with the help of late cancellations management.
• Map View Filter: The map view filter displays equipment in close proximity to customers. This feature is useful for same-day delivery/pick-up and for fulfilling high-priority rental orders.
• Pick-up/Drop-Off: Customers should get the option to select both equipment pickup and drop-off options based on their convenience. 
• Request for Quote (RFQ) Module: The RFQ option will allow you to accept complex and large-scale orders. You can receive detailed requirements through the website and send a properly analyzed price quote. All price negotiations will be saved on the platform itself.

Building a United Rentals like Website with Yo!Rent 

Catering to the rental industry all across the globe, YoRent helps entrepreneurs build versatile and intuitive equipment rental websites. It provides support for both single-vendor and multi-vendor business models and has an extensive feature set including the all aforementioned features. Additionally, YoRent automates daily operations to reduce overall operational costs and help businesses deal with day-to-day use cases. With its industry-specific design, YoRent can help you launch a highly professional equipment rental website that ensures the same customer experience as those of leading players.

Key Benefits of Using YoRent

• Available at a one-time cost. You don’t need to commit to ever-increasing recurrent pricing. 
• Self-hosted software that can be installed at your own office premises or on a third-party hosting service
• Get the most advanced rent-centric features to accept 24/7 bookings and automate business operations
• Fully scalable with unlimited listings, transactions, and user profiles
• Multilingual and multi-currency support for expanding business operations
• 25+ payment gateways to launch equipment rental business operations in any region
• Fully customizable source code to meet any additional business requirements
• 12 months of free technical support to ensure interruption-free business operations

You can review what a YoRent-powered equipment rental website will look like in its free personalized demo. 

Conclusion

United Rentals is a dominant player in the equipment rental industry, but each business has its beginning. It is through constant efforts and right decisions that you can scale and grow your business. Those decisions start with selecting the right development approach for your rental website. While the United Rentals website is quite complex, you can begin by building a smaller website and scaling it gradually for business growth. This approach will require selecting a fully scalable and customizable software, which is where Yo!Rent falls in. For more information on developing a website similar to the United Rentals website, feel free to get in touch with our rental business consultants.