Question:
Hello! I’m developing a website for a charity that lends books and wigs to women with cancer. I’d like to manage the loan of these items online and I’m thinking that one solution might be to use Wix Hotel, treating the items as rooms that are booked for a period and then made available again. The disadvantage is that in this case each “room” belongs to a different category. There are about 400 books and 100 wigs.
Do you know of any other solutions that might be suitable?
Product:
Wix Editor, Wix Studio Editor, Editor X.]
What are you trying to achieve:
I’d like to manage the loan of items online
What have you already tried:
I’m comparing the features of Wix e-shop and Wix Hotel.
In order to offer viable options for a solution, I have a few of questions …
Are you only needing to track inventory that is available and checked out?
Or are you actually charging something per each check out?
Are you aware that any app that offers online payment requires a higher premium Wix plan, whether you use the payment feature or not?
Hello Code Queen, thank you for your quick reply.
To answer your questions:
the loan is free, so there’s no need to pay,
I’d need to know the status of each item (available, on loan from “name person”, expected return date)
anyone interested could see which books or wigs are available and apply for a loan online for a given period.
This is not very far from a room in a hotel
I can code but I avoid doing too much because the sites I create with Wix are going to be managed by people who don’t have a lot of computer skills. If a problem occurs, they could be lost.
You can try Hotels. It is not codeable either way. So if the settings and verbiage in different areas do not suit your project you may want to try something else.
I don’t know if you will find something out-of-box with the native Wix apps. Each one that I think of seems to have a limitation that could stop your solution from working.
I have done custom calendars with Bookings. I guess we could treat each book and wig as a staff member but i don’t remember if there is a limit for that.
But …. now that I give it some thought, it would be difficult to keep accurate availability if we automatically assume the items will be returned by the exact date they were checked out for. Even though they are “due” does not necessarily mean they will be “available for check out” by the next person.
Maybe you could Wix Stores and set the inventory to 1 for each item. You can enable the 2 extra fields to ask what date they plan on returning or something. Or simply stipulate them to select an option from a dropdown. “3 days, 1 week, etc”.
Then when the inventory is returned, an Admin can mark it as 1 in stock again.
There is a free lending library app called Librarika. They allow up to 2,000 items in their free plan.
Thank you very much indeed Codequeen for your analysis. I too had thought about Wix Booking and Wix Store and saw exactly the same limitations as you have identified. I’ll give it a try and keep you posted. I’m going to look at the Librarika solution, which seems perfect!
Thanks again for your help, I’ll send you the website url when it’s finished.
Did it work?
I have the same situation but with reusable cups, a customer loans them for a period of time, or for an event, the point is I need them to be reserved for that days.
But also I can lend them to different clients on the same days.
100 pcs
Week 1: client 1-60 pcs, client 2 30-pcs, left to loan 10 pcs.
Hi Matej,
I ended up not using the lending service because the association preferred to continue manual book management. I did though test the Librarika platform suggested by Codequeen which works really very well and is free up to 2000 items. The lending system is effective, it is specialized for books or records, but I think you could easily adapt it. The only limitation is that there are not all languages so it depends on your customers.
I hope it will be useful to you