The baby products industry is vastly driven by sentimental values, due to which parents often tend to buy a lot of equipment, including the ones they may never use. Additionally, inflation rates in the industry make baby equipment very expensive and there’s a need for repeated purchases at various growth stages of the infant. Thus, after usage, all unrequired baby equipment, despite being in a good and reusable condition ends up creating a lot of waste. As a solution to this problem emerged several baby equipment rental stores.
An online baby gear rental business primarily targets parents looking for safe and hygienic baby gears for long durations. To fulfill these requirements, rental businesses provide properly cleaned and sanitized products. If you want to join the online equipment rental industry, you will need to make a proper business plan and invest in equipment rental software. You can take help from this quick guide to get a general overview.
In our exemplary business plan, we have covered everything you need to set up your online rental website or marketplace and start your business operations.
You need to analyze and understand consumer buying signals, their shopping patterns and on-going trends to find out what you really need on your online baby gear rental store. This will include things like figuring out the type of inventory, warehousing, delivery partner, and ways to resolve numerous customer pain points.
Types of Baby Equipment you can Lend
You can also consult the business analyst of an equipment rental software provider to help you refine your requirements and find the right solutions. Based on our analysis, you will require the following features on your rental software.
For effective digital enablement, you are also suggested to select an off-the-shelf equipment rental software. Off-the-shelf software solutions are comparatively more cost-effective than custom development and expertly developed to deal with a number of challenges and reduce time to market. Custom development, on the other hand, is only suggested in cases where off-the-shelf readymade solutions are not able to match your business requirements and can also be very costly.
Some types of rental software available in the market are:
We can consider this industry to still be in its nascent stage. However, this does not mean that the industry is free of competition. The competition might be low but can help you figure out various market dynamics and consumer demands. You can also learn a lot from your competition, such as their pricing strategy, marketing channels, sales channels, shortfalls, and more. Getting a competitive advantage can be helpful in the long run and thorough competitive analysis will help you gain the same.
| Top Companies | Startup Year | Revenue |
| BabyQuip | 2016 | $9.3 Million |
| Traveling Baby | 2010 | $5 Million |
| Baby’s Away | 1991 | $3.3 Million |
| Rockabye Baby Rentals | 2006 | $1.3 Million |
After conducting a thorough competitive analysis, you will gain insights on competitive pricing. You can set the rental fee of your baby equipment based on your competitor’s pricing and introduce attractive discounts. Apart from this, there are also various other pricing strategies that you can implement:
The digital capabilities of online mode of business also offer an opportunity to diversify income streams. This simply means that along with earning by lending baby equipment alone, you can aggregate several other sources on your rental marketplace to increase your revenue.
Some additional online income streams you should consider are:
You can also make your business asset-light by developing a community of contributors just like BabyQuip. This will make your rental business a peer-to-peer rental marketplace where you don’t need to own any inventory. Instead, various contributors will upload their products and you only need to manage the website and marketing. If you plan to launch an equipment rental marketplace, then you will also get the access to the following revenue streams:
Your software requirements may also vary in case you wish to launch a peer-to-peer equipment rental marketplace.
To finally step in the industry you will require a marketing strategy that keeps the targeted audience in the center. For this, you initially need to find out your brand propositions and Unique Selling Points (USP). They will help you create effective ad copies and show value to customers in your baby equipment rental store. Once your USPs are clear, you can begin with the execution of a proper marketing plan.
The marketing plan of your online rental store can include the following:
Being an online business, appearing in Google search results is an imperative. The higher the rank you get on Search Engine Result Pages (SERP), the better you can reach customers and increase awareness about your business. A common approach to do so is Search Engine Optimization, where you optimize your website content for search engine rankings.
Another way to get better visibility in SERPs is to do search engine advertising where a small ad snippet of your rental business will be displayed right above the search results. You can also create custom landing pages for search engine advertising.
Social media marketing assists in developing a likable brand identity and increasing business awareness. The main purpose of social media marketing is to increase engagement with customers, which can be done by uploading and sharing quality social media posts. Additionally, you can also use your equipment rental software’s marketing features for promoting discounts and offers.
Reaching a wider audience should be the goal of startups to expect more leads and conversions. Along with digital marketing, word-of-mouth marketing is also very effective at building that audience. To encourage your customers for word-of-mouth marketing, a proper referral marketing strategy is highly recommended. You can give some discounts to your customers for inviting their family and friends to your online rental store.
Once everything is ready, it is time to launch your online baby gear rental business and expect to receive orders within the very first month. Use your rental software’s administrative features for managing orders, taxes, inventory, returns, user profiles and more. Over time, there will also be a need to update the banner image for promoting new products and discounts. Regarding other areas of management, business owners are also required to gear their efforts towards business accounts management, rental security management, handling customer data and providing effective customer support.
While there are many software solutions available in the market, we recommend you Yo!Rent equipment rental software that comes with both single-vendor and multi-vendor variants. With its help you can launch both B2C and P2P equipment rental businesses and use its advanced features to simplify your business operations. Furthermore, Yo!Rent is also self-hosted and available at a one time cost. To check complete functionality, you can also check Yo!Rent’s instant and free to explore demos.
Why Select Yo!Rent?
There are not one, but multiple reasons to select Yo!Rent for your baby equipment rental operations:
Every startup venture is challenging and launching an online rental business is no difference. However, with clear goals and a straightforward approach, you can accomplish even the riskiest assumptions. For this, you need to plan ahead and gauge the market from multiple perspectives. Be it technology, logistics, team, finance or marketing, with everything in your foresight, you can draft an effective strategy that takes your business idea to feasibility.
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Abhishek Kataria is a business consultant at FATbit Technologies. He assists entrepreneurs and business owners in developing viable digital touchpoints and marketplaces. Abhishek is curious about exploring and analyzing new business trends and has a keen eye for the latest developments in the eCommerce sector. Apart from consulting, you can find him practicing French and exploring his creativity in Photoshop.
