The surge in the number of both commercial and residential development projects has led to high demand for heavy equipment rentals. However, huge orders often have complex requirements and customers look for competitive pricing to fulfill them. As customers are aware that affordable does not always mean the best, they are willing to negotiate pricing with trustable sources.
Thus, to keep up with consumer demand and stay relevant in the market, online equipment rental stores have started providing the Request-for-Quote (RFQ) option along with cart checkout.
In this blog, we will try to understand why the RFQ option is important and how it helps equipment rental websites.
There are many reasons to look for RFQ option in your online equipment rental store:
Bulk orders and consignments are required to help a rental business grow in both monetary terms and reputation. They are even more important for a B2B business. However, getting bulk orders is difficult without having any means to evaluate the order volume and give proper quotations with necessary discounts. This is where the RFQ option comes and helps businesses provide a quote after properly evaluating the order, profit margins and possible discounts.
When dealing with big orders, the client often wants to negotiate and bring the price down. With the help of modern RFQ options, equipment rental businesses can handle the negotiation directly on the online platform. To secure the deal, businesses can evaluate the possibility of additional discounts or conduct a cost-cutting feasibility to keep up the profit margins. After doing all the calculations, the business can send customers the new price via the RFQ option.
When requiring bulk equipment, users/people tend to get quotations from multiple equipment rental websites and compare which site gives them better value. With an RFQ option, businesses can provide clients with competitive pricing and match the quotation of other websites easily. This is highly beneficial when competing with players that only have fixed pricing on their website.
Bulk orders can also be complex. For example, some items can be required for longer rental durations, some can be required at multiple distant sites and there can also be many add-on items and consumables. Handling these orders on a rigid website can be difficult and managing them manually, again can be tedious. Thus, the RFQ option allows equipment rental businesses to collect all such information to provide a better and more reliable rental service.
To give a proper quotation, it is necessary to collect some details about the order. These details can vary from business to business but should be there on your RFQ form. However, we have given an exemplary form below that you can use as it is or personalize as per your requirements.
Important fields to add on an RFQ form:
Exemplary RFQ Form
Being a dedicatedly developed software for the rental industry, Yo!Rent has all the necessary features to power both multi-vendor and single-vendor rental marketplaces. One of these features is the RFQ module. Along with the option to lend and sell equipment, Yo!Rent also allows customers to request a price quote, and all three of these options (rent, buy, and RFQ) can be activated on a listing simultaneously.
How RFQ Module Works in Yo!Rent?
On the front-end, what may look like a simple RFQ button and form, is a complete quotation management module on the backend, i.e, Yo!Rent’s vendor dashboard.
With the help of the RFQ module, the business owner can find all RFQ requests under one tab (see below).
RFQ details in Yo!Rent dashboard
The business owner can also take multiple actions like view details, add price quote, add delivery cost, set rental security amount, set quotation validity date, upload documents and add comments. All these options help in providing all required details to an RFQ customer (see below).
Quotation options in Yo!Rent
Furthermore, on Yo!Rent, both customers and business owners can send counter offers to each other for price negotiation and settle a final price. If both parties are on agreeable terms, then the admin can accept the offer, otherwise reject it.
To understand the functioning in detail, you can have a look at our brief walkthrough
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Due to complex rental orders, it has become necessary to provide an RFQ option on an online equipment rental website. The option will help the website owner in providing feasible discounts and secure bulk orders. Furthermore, having an RFQ option on the website itself will automate manual quotations and assist in keeping track of all RFQ orders. Thus, being more reliable and secure in all scenarios.