Welcome to the new LensRentals.com!
Background
We’ve been planning these changes since late 2009, and implementing them over the past several months. We have grown over 400% since LensRentals 2.0 went live in 2008, and while that application was itself a large improvement over the previous generation, we had pushed it to its limits. It became hard to keep everything organized, and hard to find the things you want as the pages became so crowded. We decided not to carry certain items, just because they’d clutter things up even more. Change is always scary, but it was clearly necessary.
It’s taken months to design, rewrite, and test everything. (Our website isn’t just a bunch of pages: it handles inventory control, purchasing, quoting, shipping, tracking, order processing, and pretty much everything else.) What you’re seeing now is different, and we know some of our long-term customers are going to feel lost at first, but we are certain you’ll like it much better very quickly. Here’s a brief tour of some of the changes.
Categories
There’s a set of buttons across the top of the page, letting you choose what view of our products you’d like to see: Canon, Nikon, Four Thirds, Sony, Hasselblad, Leica, or Video. Choose one, and you’ll get a set of colored buttons representing top-level categories of things relevant to your camera system. You can click the black button again at any time to switch views.
Clicking on a category gives you a sidebar, listing items for rent and sometimes a list of subcategories.
Naturally, if you want to see a subcategory, just click on it. Our new category system is more like a tree, and you can move back up to a different level by clicking the labels above the list.
Products
Clicking a product brings you to the product page. This is where some of the cooler features live:
- Looking at an product doesn’t take you away from the list of other things in that category. They’re still there, along with their up-to-the-minute stock status.
- Prices are presented in tabular form, as before. However, once you put something in your cart, the Rent Me box at the top of the page will show you how much it costs specifically for your rental length.
- Shipping prices are computed automatically, even for heavy or oversized products, based on our guess of your location.
Clicking “Rent Me” or one of the rental lengths will add the product to your cart.
Shopping Cart
In the shopping cart, you can type in when you want the gear to arrive and how long to keep it… or you can click and drag the calendar.
You see, we now offer custom rental periods. If you want an 8-day rental, go for it—you don’t need to pay for 10 days any more. Click and drag the calendar to choose a date range, click and drag one of the edges to resize your rental, or click and drag the middle to move it around. The shopping cart will display the new duration and price in real-time.
If you want to add more items, just click on the proper tab to get to that category. Now, when you visit other item pages, the “Rent Me” box will display what the price will be for the duration you’ve already selected.
Search
If you know exactly what you’re looking for, try the search box. We like it. It’s smart.
Is that it?
Honestly, no, but those are the most important things. You might also notice that it’s faster, easier to read, and prettier. There’s also a ton of internal features that help us do our jobs better, and possibly several smaller ones significant to you that we haven’t mentioned here. We’ve also got a bunch of stuff that’s didn’t quite make this launch, but will be coming soon, including a new mobile site.
Obviously, this is all new, and it’ll take some getting used to. Also, as much as we’ve worked on this, there may be problems we haven’t found, so if you find something amiss, please let us know. We’ve increased our on-call staff this week to cover emails with 15-minute response times. If you have any problems, even outside of office hours, don’t hesitate to email us at support@lensrentals.com. We’re here to help.
—Roger Cicala, Will Glynn, and the entire LensRentals team
