How to Create an Event Rental Website with Shopify

The Easiest Way to Bring Your Event Rental Business Online

Written by: Marcelo Flores

Launching an event rental website can feel overwhelming—but with Shopify, it doesn’t have to be. This guide walks you through the exact steps to create a clean, professional, and functional rental site that helps you get more bookings and grow your business online.

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1. Why Shopify Works for Event Rental Businesses

Although Shopify is often seen as a platform for traditional e-commerce, it’s also a powerful tool for event rental companies looking to go digital. It’s super easy to use, offers clean design options, and has a wide range of apps and integrations that make it a great choice for rental businesses that need flexibility without hiring a full development team.

Shopify offers a clean, mobile-friendly interface that allows you to build trust quickly with high-quality visuals, reviews, and clear calls to action.

While Shopify is designed primarily for selling products, you can still adapt it to support rentals, bookings, and date-based availability by using the right apps and settings. Moreover, compared to fully custom sites, Shopify lets you launch faster, maintain security, and scale more easily as your catalog grows.

2. Planning Your Website Before You Start

First, before you do anything else, it’s essential to plan your site with strategy in mind. After all, a little preparation will not only save time but also help you create a website that’s easy to navigate, optimized for search, and, ultimately, built to convert visitors into paying clients.

Start by doing thorough keyword research. Identify what your ideal customers are searching for. Terms like “Chiavari chair rental,” or “wedding furniture rentals.” This helps you structure your product pages and collections around actual search behavior, increasing your chances of showing up in Google results.

After doing your keyword research you should end up having an outline of the structure and categories for your site. To begin, outline your core categories. Additionally, if your catalog is long enough, you could create subcategories for styles such as ‘Chiavari chairs’ or ‘Folding chairs.’ For event rentals, this might include:

• Tables

• Tents

• Linens

• Dance Floors

• Catering Equipment

• Packages

Organize your collections around how your customers browse: by product type, event type, or bundled packages.

Also plan out your essential pages:

• Home

• About

• Contact

• FAQ

• Rental Policies

• Product or Collection Pages

And finally, define your booking process:

Will users be able to check availability? Submit a quote request? Pay a deposit? Knowing this ahead of time will help you select the right Shopify apps and layout structure.

Gather all your content and assets before building:

• High-quality product photos

• Pricing and availability info

• Clear product descriptions

• Delivery/setup policies

• Your branding, logo, and testimonials

Ultimately, proper planning ensures that once you enter Shopify, everything from product names to categories and buttons aligns with what your audience is actually searching for—and how they prefer to book.

Shopify currently offers a promotion for new users, where you pay only $1 for the first three months. Once you’ve planned your site, pricing depends on the plan you choose.

3. Choosing the Right Shopify Theme for Rentals

Shopify themes are templates that determine how your website looks and feels. The theme you choose will shape the design, layout, and overall user experience, so it’s worth picking one that matches both your brand and the way your customers browse.

While Shopify offers a wide variety of free and paid themes, a few stand out for event rental businesses. Consider starting with Dawn (free), Motion, or Impulse. These themes are clean, modern, and highly customizable, making them perfect for catalog-style businesses, even if you’re not selling products directly.

They also support strong visual storytelling, which is essential when showcasing event setups and rental inventory.

4. Setting Up Products as Rentals (Not Just Sales)

Although Shopify is built for selling products, with the right setup, you can easily adapt it for rentals. For example, rather than displaying prices and “Buy Now” buttons, you can customize your store to enable quote requests and date selection based on your rental workflow.

Here are a few options to approach rentals inside Shopify:

A. Request a Quote

For many rental businesses, it makes more sense to collect inquiries rather than take full payments upfront. You can replace the “Add to Cart” or “Buy Now” button with a “Request a Quote” form using apps like:

• Request a Quote & Hide Prices

• Quote Snap

• Globo Request a Quote

These allow customers to submit details (event date, location, quantities) so you can respond with a custom quote.

B. Date Selection and Booking

If you want customers to check availability or reserve inventory directly from the site, use apps like:

• IzyRent: Rentals & Bookings

• BookThatApp

• Tipo Booking App Rentals

• Reservations by Booqable

These let you add date pickers, rental durations, and even real-time inventory availability to each product page.

C. Partial Payments or Deposits

If you accept deposits upfront, Shopify supports partial payment features with apps like:

• Advanced Deposit

• Pre‑Order Now

• Partial.ly Payment Plans

This allows clients to reserve their rentals without paying the full amount right away.

5. Key Apps to Enable Booking, Calendars, and Inventory Control

To run a successful event rental website on Shopify, you’ll likely need more than the platform’s built-in features. That’s where third-party apps come in. The right apps can help you handle bookings, manage your calendar, and keep track of your rental inventory in real-time, all from your Shopify dashboard.

1. IzyRent: Rentals & Bookings

A popular all-in-one app for rentals, IzyRent allows you to add date pickers, set rental durations, prevent double bookings, and track availability per product. It’s designed specifically for Shopify users in the rental space and supports both hourly and daily rentals.

2. Booqable

While it requires a separate Booqable account, this is one of the most powerful inventory systems for rental businesses. It integrates with Shopify and allows you to handle real-time inventory, multi-day bookings, partial payments, and even automated contracts and quotes.

3. BookThatApp

A flexible and powerful booking tool, BookThatApp lets customers book items by date, time, or even by location. You can block off unavailable dates, manage multiple locations, and set custom booking rules per product—ideal for complex rental workflows.

4. Tipo Booking App

A beginner-friendly app that adds calendar and time slot functionality to product pages. Great for smaller rental companies or businesses just starting out, Tipo supports email confirmations, appointment limits, and blackout dates.

6. Creating Important Pages: Home, About, Contact, FAQ

Beyond your product and collection pages, your event rental website needs a set of core pages that build trust, answer questions, and guide users through the rental process. They directly impact how confident a visitor feels when deciding to rent from you. Here are four essential pages every rental website should have:

Home Page

This page is extremely important because up to 75% of people that come to your website see the homepage as a first impression. Make sure it’s clear what you offer and who you serve right away. Include:

• A clean hero image or banner showing your rentals in use. It’s important you select the right hero image.

• A short value statement

• Featured categories or packages

• Trust signals (reviews, partners, years in business, etc.)

• A clear call to action: “Browse Rentals,” “Request a Quote,” or “View Catalog”

• Add a gallery of past events

• Use video where you can.

Another study found that visitors judge your website and decide to stay or not in about 50 milliseconds. That’s half 0.05 seconds. Insane.

About Page

This is where you build credibility. Share your story, experience, values, and what sets you apart. Let visitors know why they should trust you with their event. Add a friendly photo or a team intro if possible, it makes your business feel more human.

Contact Page

Make it easy for clients to reach you. Include:

• A contact form

• Your phone number and email

• Social media links

• Operating hours

• Service area or delivery zones (especially important for rentals)

Bonus: Add a Google Map embed if you have a warehouse or showroom.

FAQ Page

This is where you answer the most common questions, saving time for both you and the client. Cover topics like:

• Delivery and pickup policies

• Minimum rental orders

• Booking timelines

• Deposit and payment options

• Cancellation and rescheduling

A well-structured FAQ page can reduce friction and build confidence, especially for first-time customers.

Optimized Request a Quote Page

As we’ve discussed earlier, you’ll probably have a cart and checkout page. However, although Shopify themes provide a nice design, it’s still important to optimize those pages so they convert.

Think what your customer would like to see at the final stages and that will make him convert.

• Reviews

• Trust badges

• Clear Calls to Action

• Incentives and Urgency

• Progress Indicators

As an advice, try doing A/B testing. Test different elements of the checkout page to identify what works best and optimize for conversions. Test one element at a time so you can track effectively what works and what doesn’t.

7. Optimizing for Local SEO and Online Visibility

If your rental business serves a specific region, showing up in local search results is key. When your customers search for party rentals on Google, you want your site to appear at the top.

To do that, your Shopify site needs to be optimized for local SEO. This includes using location-based keywords, setting up a Google Business Profile, and collecting reviews to build trust and visibility.

We’ve created a complete guide that walks you through all of this step by step:

We’ve created a complete SEO guide for party rentals you can follow to help you rank higher and get more bookings.

8. Final Tips – What to Avoid and How to Stand Out

Building a rental website with Shopify is easier than ever, but there are a few common pitfalls to avoid and opportunities to make your brand stand out.

What to Avoid

• Using generic product names or descriptions: Instead, include keywords, sizes, and event use cases (e.g., “Gold Chiavari Chair for Weddings”).

• Relying only on one form of contact:  Not everyone wants to call, include a form, email, phone number, and even a quote request option.

• Overcomplicating the process: Keep your navigation, booking process, and CTAs simple and clear. Don’t make customers work to rent from you.

How to Stand Out

• Use real event photos instead of stock images: Seeing your chairs, tents, or setups in action builds trust instantly.

• Offer helpful content: Blog posts, event inspiration, setup guides, or FAQs make you a resource, not just a rental company.

• Leverage Video: This industry is very visual, so take advantage of that. Use video on your homepage, categories and products. You can also add a video on your “about us” page to build credibility.

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Shopify gives event rental businesses everything they need to launch a powerful online presence, without custom code or complex tools. With the right structure, apps, and messaging, your site can attract local traffic, convert visitors, and scale as you grow.