Cartthrob: How to set up product that is available for rent OR purchase?

Question

I need to set up a checkout system when certain products say, a camera, can be either purchased OR rented.

I understand how this could be accomplished with separate entries for purchase/rental options. Using price modifiers will handle the different rental options nicely.

Obviously I don't want site admins to have to enter this content multiple times however. Anyone know the best way to approach this?

Answer 1

You could do a few things, all of which include having one entry per product (not needing to separate them).

• Manage rental and purchase prices as a Cartthrob price modifier field.
• Pre-populate matrix or modifier field rows by using some JavaScript in the instructions area.
• Set up fields for purchase prices and rental prices, use a checkbox to indicate whether the product is available for purchase or rent. Then apply the appropriate price on the front-end using the allow_user_price="yes" parameter on the {exp:cartthrob:add_to_cart} tag, a hidden price input field, and some jQuery.

The downside to using the allow_user_price parameter solution, is that if someone really wanted, they could enter their own price by modifying the hidden price field's value using devtools or firebug.

Answer 2

I've set up rentals before of digital goods by writing a simple extension that set the 'Purchased Product' entry to have a expiration date of one week (or any time length really) from the date of purchase. You could do the same for a physical product. I'd share the code with you for this, but unfortunately I am unable to due to licensing restrictions.

I'm guessing you may be dealing with a quantity limitation when renting physical products. Similar to the above suggestion you could have a entry for each instance of a rentable product and change the entry date (via a hook) to a future date each time it's purchased. Possibly better yet you could change the status of the purchased product to 'rented' and once the product is returned you could manually revert it back to 'open'. I don't have any code to support this example - but it's definitely possible.

Good luck!