Rental subscription model for the Smart Home products
Rental subscription model for the Smart Home products
tink was the first online marketplace for connected home products.
Founded in Berlin in 2016, they have a team of more than 50 people bringing the connected home to the mass market.
They have also acquired more than 40 product partners (incl. SONOS, Bosch, Google) and are backed by investors ProSiebenSat1, Rocket Internet and Vattenfall.
our challenge
In order to increase their number of customers, tink decided to introduce and test a new sales model that allows people to rent smart home products by paying a recurring monthly fee instead of buying them. Rental customers were also to be offered an extended warranty for the whole hire period.
Our task was to set up a recurring payment system for the rentals and integrate this with tink’s existing Magento sales system.
Everything had to be integrated with the custom implementation of bundle products in Magento.
Solution
In order to introduce a recurring payment system for renting smart home products, we had to divide the project into a few phases:
One of the recurring payment providers with a proper API which we considered was billwerk.io.
We decided to use it in our implementation as it met all of tinkās business requirements.
One of the challenges for this project was the fact that products to buy and to rent cannot be added to the same basket, as they require different payment methods, and the process of ordering them is constructed differently.
With this in mind, and taking into account the complexity of the current multistore/multilanguage Magento checkout, we wanted to keep the solution as simple as possible. As the rental cart and checkout processes were simpler than a standard Magento, we decided to use React, and create these processes out of Magento standard routers with phtml files.
We considered this the quickest way to achieve our clientās goal and keep the implementation simple. This approach will also allow us to move most of the frontend parts when we migrate to Magento 2.
Integrations
Outcome / benefits
The rental business model was successfully integrated into tinkās Magento e-commerce shop.
It extended the range of potential customers, as people appreciated the subscription model of using products while paying a fraction of the full product price each month.
The development of our partnership clearly shows our high level of satisfaction and we can highly recommend the Panda Group as an agency as well as full-service provider.
We really appreciate Szymon’s entrepreneurial mindset, his high level of reliability as well as outstanding IT skills. Especially during critical times, we received excellent and result-driven support.
CEO & Co-founder Dr. Marius Lissautzki,
COO & Co-founder Dr. Julian Hueck