Creating a subscription product

How to create a product to be available as a subscription

Your products in Rentle can be available for sale, for one-time rent, or for long-term rent under a subscription contract with periodically recurring billing. When selling access to subscription products, you define the length of the contract period and price, your customers will pay the first fee upon check-out and Rentle charges the customer's payment card according to the billing cycle until the end of the contract. 

On this page

Requirements and limitations

1. Creating a subscription product

2. Defining subscription period and price

3. Make it available to your customers

4. Additional product settings

Requirements and limitations

The current (first) version of Rentle's subscription features comes with the following requirements and limitations:

When creating subscription products, Rentle requires you to enable online payments to capture your customers' payment card details and automatically charge the recurring fees.

The billing cycles are currently pre-set to be monthly and will end automatically at the end of the commitment period.

Pre-authorized security deposits have a time restriction and can't be held longer than one month.

How to create subscription products

1. From your catalog select new product. 
2. Enter at least the product name and scroll down to define the monthly subscription price
3. You can already enter a product description, select the correct category, and tax rate, and add product images now. You can however add and edit those at a later point as well.
4. Click create product

2. Defining subscription period and price

For each subscription product, you can freely define the applicable terms and pricing.

In the terms section, define the full length of the subscription duration as the commitment period and determine how often your customers will be charged as the respective payment cycles. For now, payment cycles are pre-defined to be every 1 month – in the future, you can define your payment cycles depending on your business requirements.

Once you have set up the terms, set your prices for each commitment period in the price section below. Fill in the "Price (currency)" column with the price you charge for your product for each payment cycle in the respective commitment period. In the column "Committed total (currency)" the total revenue per commitment period is calculated. 

Here is an example: A subscription for 2 months will be charged 50.00 € each month, thus resulting in a total revenue of 100.00 € for one sold subscription. If a customer however purchases a subscription for one entire year, the monthly fee will just be 30.00 €, resulting in a total of 360.00 € for the entire year.

3. Make it available to your customers

By default, your newly created product has unlimited availability. To limit its availability, it must be connected to an SKU in your inventory.

1. Navigate to the Availability tab and click Connect to inventory.
2. Click Choose SKU and select from the dropdown menu either an existing SKU (when you already created your inventory) or +Create new SKU and insert how many articles you have for Rent.
   
   
   A detailed guide on connecting products to inventory can be found in another article.
3. Lastly, navigate to your product's General Settings set your product to be publicly visible in your sales channels and click save.
   
   

That's it, your product is now available for subscriptions to your customers!

4. More product settings

Once you have created a basic rental product its time to finetune its settings. 

Here is an overview of all product settings you can take in Rentle ->

Learn how your customers can order a subscription product from your online store -->