Magento Rental & Lease-to-Own Case Study

2020

built, and maintained by us since

custom modules for rental, lease and school programmes

ways to buy: purchase, rent, lease to own

The client

The Instrument Place sells stringed, brass, woodwind and percussion instruments online. It also rents and leases them: a saxophone or a drum kit goes out to a student or a school, comes back, gets renewed, or converts into a purchase.

The brief

Run two businesses on one store. Selling is what Magento does out of the box. Renting and leasing are not: standard Magento sells something once and takes payment once. It has no idea of a lease, a renewal, a rental period or a school supply programme.

What we built

We built the store on Magento Open Source in 2020 and have maintained it ever since. The custom layer, about ten modules, sits exactly where the platform stops:

Rental. Rental product types and recurring rental billing.
Lease to own. Lease accounts, renewals and conversion from lease to purchase.
School programmes. A school-programme flow with its own lists and order comments, so schools can supply instruments to students.
Preferred pricing and a custom checkout built around how instrument customers actually buy.

Around that sit the integrations any serious retailer needs and somebody has to keep working: Algolia hosted search, ShipStation for fulfilment, Google Shopping feeds, and order export and invoicing tools for the back office.

Keeping it current

The rental and lease layer is bespoke billing logic, so every Magento upgrade means re-verifying it. We do that each time and keep the store on current security patches, applying them between vendor releases when a fix can't wait. The project runs on the same toolchain as our other Magento work: PHPUnit, PHPStan, PHP_CodeSniffer on the Magento standard, PHPMD and MFTF.

What we'd carry into the next rental build

Choose the billing engine first. Custom recurring logic on Magento works and has served this client for years. On a new rental build we'd compare it with a dedicated subscription platform early, before the catalogue decisions are made.
Budget re-verification into every upgrade. Custom billing is worth its upgrade cost when it's planned for, so we put it in the upgrade estimate from day one.