Change suggestion regarding Rental Business (in General)

Since I've become more involved in the rental business recently, I've thought of a few ideas that would make it more efficient and useful for the Loanee.

1. I have many items for rent, and so to avoid the 10 item max per character, I've divvied them up among my characters. It would be useful to know which characters have what items in their rental inventory. It would also allow me to anticipate when the items would return to that character's inventory when the rental period expires.

2. It would be VERY useful to know how well an item performed during the previous rental period. For instance, if I knew that an item rented only 10% of it's time, I would likely lower the rental fee so it would rent better. Similarly, if an item rented 100% of it's available period, I might consider raising the rental price a little.

3. Finally, if a rental fee was totally miscalculated and the item has not been rented for, say it's first 2 rental periods, it would be nice to adjust the rental fee. Maybe we could abort the rental, get a prorated share of the rental fee back, and then be able to re-rent the item at a better rate.

Any other suggestions for rentals are welcome. These are the ones that I thought of that would be very helpful overall.

Eh, correction: useful to the LOANER. :)

For #2 - look at your items in the rental screen before the rental period expires. You'll see how many unclaimed rentals are left vs. time. So if you had set 7 1 day rentals or 7 days max, and you see 6 rentals left with a day left to go, you know it was only rented once.

For #3 - would it not be better to look at all rented items to get a sense of what people are paying to rent a similar item, then price yours accordingly? Or if it is so rare a rental, put it in for a day rental at a high price to see if you get a nibble.

To add to the list

- ability to extend a rental period of an item you're currently putting in rentals at the same rate

G Max--thanks for the suggestions.

Actually I do like the idea of EXTENDING the rental at the same price, period etc. That would save alot of time.

I sure like your MH I'm loaning right now :)

4. I would like there to be an additional time period to add to renting, a minimum time unrented option. Therefore, we can set it so the item can be gotten back sooner if it's not selling. If I set it so an item is to come back to me in 2 days after not being rented then I can put it back on rental for a more sellable price and length. Even if you force me to lose all the money of putting the item into rentals, It'll still be better off then seeing it just sit there for days without any benefit to me or anyone else.

GPV's gold ideas just keep coming... That one might be a hair tougher to implement, though, since one would have to keep track of last return. Sorry, thinking like a data modeler... New database fields = too hard to bother. *smile* But from a usability standpoint, like I said. GOLD.

Thanks Chet, I'm glad you like it. : )

Come on, Jonathan! I can learn AOL Server and Tcl/Tk...really, I can! I promise! Turn this mother over so I can do what GPV says do!

the good news is that CB doesn't use Tk :)

/me blushes.

I guess I should at least know a cross-platform GUI widget set wouldn't be used on a web site, eh?

The bad news is, I don't even really know Tcl. *grin*

My acute problem is that I've kept poor rental records and don't know how many items each one of my characters has rented out. So the question I have is: if I goof and have one char rent out more than 10 items and they all expire and come back to the character, will the items over 10 go poof?
In other words, if I goof do the items poof? :)

That's why it would be nice to be able to see which items are connected to which characters during rental periods. Also, I am acquiring more items and adding them to rentals, and that is getting a little nerve racking not knowing the consequence I am worried about.

items don't "poof"

big sigh of relief! -- thanks Jon

So my current plan is to begin taking better inventory and records of the rentals connected to my characters.

Rented items take up a slot on the character that rented it out. So the item is virtually there with you. I know this to be a fact because people can only send 8 armor pieces to Storage Tank for my contest (shameless plug) since that char has two armour pieces out in rentals.

If that's the case GPV, then each char can actually rent out a maximum of 46 items: 9 items per minion plus 10 unequipped items in inventory. That would leave a whole lot of room available for rentals. But is it in fact the case?

I had a large thriving rental gig going in cb1. I averaged about 200k a week on 2 million investment of equipment. It was pretty fun tracking what was and wasn't renting (not just what i owned, but others as well so I knew what good rental investments were). I too wished for a more user friendly interface. But I am not much of a designer so never had any solid concrete thoughts to add.

A simple addition would be to add a filter on transfer logs that you can filter out and see your rental related transactions. That would give you a quick view of what has been rented in last month. I got more information from my transfer logs then i ever did from rental page.

Barron, you can't rent out items that are equiped. So you can only rent out 10 armor pieces and 10 weapon pieces per char. If you want to rent out more then that, well then your going to need more characters.