Most of the buyers these days want everything to be available at their fingertips.
Whether it’s buying a product or searching for some information, people expect to do everything quickly & hassle-free.
Renting a car is at no exception.
Today there are plenty of car rental websites that offer quick & instant booking online.
If you too, run a car rental business, you must have a professional website with a booking engine.
Why it’s so important for a car hire business to build a website?
- A car rental website allows the users to search & view all the available car options.
- A car rental website allows users to confirm their booking by paying online.
- A car rental website that has a booking engine can show your customers real-time car availability.
- A car rental website can help you to automate your business and reduce human errors.
- A car rental website can serve as your ‘customer care tool‘ that can answer all of the questions of your customers and assist them in making an online booking.
- A car rental website is much affordable as compared to booking softwares or manual processes.
With so many benefits, you definitely can’t afford to develop a car rental website for your business. Don’t worry if you are worried about your budget. You can choose WordPress to build your car rental website that will reduce your web development cost by almost 30% to 50%.
But before you hire a web developer to build your car rental website, you must make sure to list down the essential features that your website must have.
In this blog post, I have shared 7 essential features that your car rental website must have.
Let’s dive in.
#1 Itemised cost
In order to get more sales & bookings on your car rental website, you must make sure that your website has displayed itemised cost for each car, before your customers even initiate the checkout process.
If there are any surcharges or hidden costs, you must mention about them upfront so that your customers don’t get surprises on the final checkout page.
The more surprises your customers get on the checkout page, the higher will be the order abandonment rate. Which means low or no conversions.
Below are some of the items that your website must show, if they are applicable:
- Weekend charges
- Additional accessories charges
- Fuel charges
- Insurance charges
- Delivery charges for different destinations
- Additional charges for late return
When the customers see any of the above charges only on the final checkout page and nowhere else, they may get shocked and may quit your website to never return back.
#2 Easy checkout
The checkout process of your car rental website must be short & easy. Usually, complicated checkout systems lead to a high order abandonment rate even if the users are wiling to make a booking.
Here are few things to ensure on your checkout page to make it hassle-free:
- Ask only required information from the customers.
- If your form is too long, try to split them in 2 or 3 steps.
- Make sure that the font size of all the fields are not too small.
- Ensure the responsiveness of your checkout page.
- Show the booking summary on checkout page along with an option to edit the booking details without leaving the checkout page.
- Allow customers to write a custom message for you to consider after the booking is confirmed.
- Provide a link to terms & conditions page and allow your users to click and view without leaving the checkout page.
Optimizing your checkout page can alone make a huge difference in your overall sales & bookings.
#3 Advance Search
The search feature can be considered as a backbone of any car rental website. If the searching ability of your website is not dynamic & flexible, you may not get enough bookings.
Therefore, you must request your web designer to include advance search feature on your website.
Your website visitors must be able to:
- Search & filter the cars according to the selected price range.
- Filter the cars based on their category & brands.
- Filter the cars based on their seating capacity.
- Change the dates & time on the search page and filter the results accordingly.
The primary objective of search feature on your website should be to provide maximum filtration option for the users so that they can find their desired car and make the booking instantly.
#4 Robust reporting
Reporting is another crucial area of your car rental website that your web builder must focus on.
As an administrator of the website, you should be able to view & download different types of reports from your website.
Below are some of the important reports that your website must be able to generate for you:
- Total bookings for any specific date-range.
- Total customers
- Total vehicles
- Total cancellations for any specific date-range.
- Total collection for any specific date-range.
#5 Cancellation & Modification
Another important feature of your car rental website should be the ability for your customers to modify or cancel their bookings.
Your customers may have entered some wrong details while filling out the booking form which they may want to change.
And if you don’t provide them any option to edit their booking details, they may call you or email you and you will have to do it manually.
So, in order to save your time, you should ask your web developer to provide an option for the customers to modify their bookings. Same applies for booking cancellation too.
Ability to cancel or modify the bookings will help:
- Your customers to modify or cancel instantly without contacting you.
- You to save your time & effort to make booking changes for your customers.
#6 Terms & Conditions
Before your customers pay for their booking, they must agree to your terms & conditions.
It’s advisable for all the car rental companies who accept online bookings to publish their terms & conditions on their websites and make it mandatory for the customers to accept them before they make the final payment.
Having clearly stated terms & conditions on your website will avoid any kind of dispute or conflicts with your customers.
Below are some of the important clauses that your terms & conditions must have:
- The pickup & drop rules.
- The penalty that your customers may have to pay in case of any delay to return your car.
- Any additional charges that may be liable to pay in case of any damages to the car.
- Any deduction on refunds for booking cancellation, if applicable.
- Any additional charges for making modifications in booking dates or time, if applicable.
#7 Booking confirmation
A confirmation email or SMS to be sent to the customers upon successful payment is very important. In the absence of any confirmation, your customers may not know whether the booking is confirmed or not.
Moreover, when your customers won’t see any confirmation message, they may call you or email you to check their booking status. It will unnecessarily create additional work on your side to check the payment & booking status and confirm your client.
To avoid any manual interference, you need to make sure that your car rental website is able to send out the confirmation messages automatically when the payment is received online.
What are the important information that must be sent with the confirmation email or SMS?
- Customers’ personal details
- Car pickup & drop location
- Booking dates & time
- Vehicle details
- Detailed breakup of car booking amount
- Any additional accessories, if required
- Link to terms & conditions
Conclusion:
No matter how good your web developer is, you should also know what are the essential features that you must not miss out while developing a car rental website for your business.
By implementing all of the features list above, you will be able to create a website that will not only take care of your customers but will also reduce your workload by automating most of your business processes.