TWICE Commerce enables you to sell access to intangible products with or without physical products. At the core is TWICE’s individualized inventory, which is separated from the products you sell, rent or sell access to via subscriptions.
Let’s go over couple examples how you can start selling tours, lessons or activities with or without rental products. In my example I want to offer surf lessons with or without surf boards, but of course you can use the same logic to enable online bookings to any activity (tours, lessons, classes,...) and rental product.
Let's start by creating the products: a 3 hour surf lesson and a surf board rental.
Let's create a new product in Catalog.
Let’s
And press Create.
After the product is created we can go to the Pricing-tab and remove all items from the pricing table except one, which we modify to be for 3 hours and cost $60.
And press Save changes.
Next, let's move to Availability-tab and connect it to the inventory and then adjust the availability. Let's start by connecting it to the inventory.
Let’s create a new SKU called “SURF-LESSON”, add 2 items (number of our instructors), make sure the Track each item individually is selected and de-select the Automatically generate item codes, which enables us to add the Unique identifiers (names of the instructors).
And click Add 2 items.
And then Save changes.
Now we have connected the surf lesson product to the inventory and created two instructors. This means that there are two instructors are available “for rent”, so there can be two simultaneous bookings, if the instructors are not already booked or marked as unavailable.
Next, we can adjust the availability. In this example we want to only have the surf lessons available during weekend at 9:00 am, 1:00 pm and 5:00 pm. We can accomplish this by editing the existing rule (pen icon).
We want to make sure they are available weekly, on Saturdays and Sundays at custom times and allow orders outside opening hours.
Then press Ok and Save changes.
Now our surf lesson is all set up and we can go back to the General tab and make sure it’s status is Public and check it at the store through View in store link.
We can see in the online store that the lesson is only available for 3 hours on Saturdays and Sundays at 9 am, 1 pm and 5 pm.
Next, let's create the surf board rental product
Let's create another product, similar to the surf lesson.
In the Pricing tab we can utilize the Base price functionality, which helps us create pricing table fast. Let's set the base price as $5 and the pricing table adjusts with proper multiples. Let's leave it as 1, 2, 4 hours and 1 day (within the opening hours).
And save changes.
In the Availability tab we want to connect it to the inventory. Let’s create 5 items and name the SKU “SURF-BOARD”. Let’s leave both Track each item individually and Automatically generate item codes as active. And click Add 5 items.
And save the changes.
This time we don’t have to do any modifications to the default availability settings. This means the board is available for rent during the store’s opening hours (which you can adjust under settings, I made them 6:00 am to 9:00 pm daily).
Let's go back to the General tab, change the status to Public, save changes and go check out our online store.
Now we have the basic store set up with surf lesson and a board rental. This already enables us to start selling the lessons and offer board rentals, but let's next look into how we can offer surf lessons with a rental board in two ways.
In the first option want to surface a product recommendation after the customer has added the surf lesson to their cart for board rental..
To accomplish this, we want to create another surf board rental, but this time limit it to the same 3 hours period as the surf lesson. We can call it “Surf board rental (for surf lesson)”.
In the Pricing tab we can create a price for 3 hours for $10 (let’s give a small discount compared to the regular board rental). Let’s give it a custom Title “During the surf lesson”.
We can also create another price for 1 day (within opening hours) to allow the customer to keep on surfing after the lesson. Let’s give it a custom Title of “During the lesson and rest of the day” and give it an attractive price of $20.
Next, we want to edit the start times to match the lesson and connect it to the same inventory as the other surf board rental product. This way we’ll make sure we will never overbook the surf boards we have (this starts to give you the idea of the power of our inventory and why it is detached from the products).
This time, let's keep it Hidden in the General tab, as we only want to offer it with the surf lesson.
Next we want to head to the Surf lesson product and to its’ Settings, where we’ll add the newly create Surf board rental (for surf lesson) product as a Product recommendation.
After saving the changes we can head to the online store, add the surf lesson to the order and we have an awesome way to offer exclusive board rental for our surf lesson customers from the same inventory!
In the next option we want to create a Product package, which bundles the lesson and the rental board in to a one product.
To accomplish this we want to create a new product, called “3 Hour Surf Lesson with Rental Board”.
After creating the product we have the option to mark that This is a package product at the bottom of the General tab.
There we want to include the 3 Hour Surf Lesson and the Surf board rental (for surf lesson) products and save the changes.
Let's give it a one price on the Pricing tab for $70 and save changes.
In the Availability tab we notice that the availability is automatically linked to connected products’ availabilities! Only thing want to change here is to give the packaged product the same availability as the regular surf lesson (Saturdays and Sundays at 9 am 1 pm and 5 pm).
Let's change the status to Public and check the online store, where we have now two surf lessons available, one without and with a rental board.
Now we have a shop that is using the same inventory (2 instructors = 2 lessons at the same time and 5 boards) with multiple offerings, weather the customer chooses just the surf lesson, lesson with board and wants to just rent one of the boards.
The final option is to combine both approaches. This could be a great solution for example for Surf lessons which accept multiple participants for the same price, but only includes 1 (or 0) rental boards. This way the customer can book the lesson and add as many rental boards as they need.
If you want to check out the Demo store, you can do it here (and yes, I noticed the typo on the “TWICE Demo Surf Show” after I already took all the screenshots 🫠).