Getting the most out of Shopify pricing

For those of you familiar with Shopify pricing options, there are several restrictions within their pricing engine that can be frustrating for merchants. Today I’m going to share some tips that we’ve used with our product rental and appointment customers that may be helpful to get around some of the inherent challenges of product pricing within Shopify.

One of the most common questions we get is how to take hourly appointments/bookings and charge based on the length of the time selected. This one is pretty straightforward. You can set up Shopify variants to represent your hourly rates and allow your customers to choose their own length of time. For example, you may choose to offer a duration of one hour, three hours or an all day rental option. BookThatApp supports setting duration based on Variant so you can easily assign each of your variants a duration value in the app. This solution allows you to offer variable timeslots to your customers and maximise rental revenue. The best part, is you can do this all in a single product so there is less maintenance for you as a merchant.

Another common request we get from our customers is how to set up seasonal pricing or different pricing based on the days of the week. Seasonal pricing is not supported in Shopify but there are some ways to overcome this using the native features of BookThatApp. The simplest way to add seasonal pricing is to set up Shopify variants to represent your seasonal rates. For example, you may have a High and Low season, or a Weekday and Weekend price. You can then use the features in BookThatApp to manage availability for the variants. For customers who run tours, BookThatApp has a seasonal rates module to trigger seasonal pricing based on the date selected.

We also get requests from merchants who want to provide tiered pricing based on the length of the rental. There are a couple of ways to achieve this. Similar to the hourly example above, you can set up Shopify variants to represent price breaks for a fixed period of duration. For example, you may offer a set price for a daily rental, a weekly rental and a monthly rental. You would then add the relevant duration next to each variant in BookThatApp.

However you can take pricing one step further and create descending price breaks based on the number of days selected in the rental period. Similar to the fixed duration option, you would create Shopify variants to represent your price breaks. As an example you may want to charge $20 per day for the first week of the rental and then $15/day for any period longer than one week. BookThatApp allows you to associate the number of days selected to a price break. This means that if a customer chooses a set number of days, the app can correctly select the relevant price based on how many days were selected.

Another popular use case is setting price breaks based on the number of attendees. Let’s say for example that you offer a 10% discount if two or more people book at the same time. You can set up a Shopify variant to represent thenumber of people in the party and provide a discount based on the number of attendees. Next, using the features in BookThatApp you can map the variant against the number of people booking. It’s a great way to ensure your capacity is always accurate based on the party size!

The last pricing option I’ll discuss today is how to capture a rental bond or deposit with a rental item. This is useful if you are renting high tickets items andwant to protect your investment. This solution involves adding some custom code to your Shopify theme that automatically adds the “bond/deposit” product to the cart. The bond/deposit line item can then be fully or partially refunded (based on the condition of the item) when the rental item is returned. It can be used to either capture a fixed bond/deposit amount, or a variable bond/deposit amount based on the value of the item. It’ a great way to ensure that you are covered for any accidental damage to your rental products.

Feel free to reach out to us via our support desk if you have a unique pricing model and need some help getting set up.