Setting up your products in Shopify

Before you link a product into Rentshelf, it’s worth a few minutes to get the product set up correctly in Shopify. This page explains what the app reads from Shopify and what you can still edit later.

Create the product in Shopify first

Rentshelf does not create products for you — it reads products from your existing Shopify catalog and adds rental behaviour on top. So:

1. Go to Shopify admin → Products → Add product.

2. Set the title, description, images and status.

3. If you plan to use the Predefined rental durations mode (recommended), create one variant per rental length — for example:

   • 3 days — $30
   • 7 days — $60
   • 14 days — $100

   Use a meaningful variant name like Rental length and duration values like 3 days, 7 days.

4. If you plan to use Manually-selected date ranges, a single variant with your flat per-day price is enough.

5. Set Inventory tracking to Don't track quantity — Rentshelf manages its own inventory (units + bookings) and decrementing Shopify stock on top would cause false “out of stock” errors.

What the app reads from Shopify

When you link a product in Rentshelf → Products → Link product, the app pulls:

• Product title and handle (used to build the storefront URL)
• Product GID (internal Shopify identifier)
• First variant price — used as the initial per-day rate when you pick DAILY pricing mode
• Featured image (displayed on the admin bookings screen)

These fields stay in sync automatically. If you rename the product, update the handle or change a variant price in Shopify, the app picks up the change on the next admin page load and via the products/update webhook.

Handles and URLs

The rental picker auto-injects on product pages by matching the product handle. You don’t need to configure URLs — as long as you visit /products/<handle> on your storefront, the picker will appear.

Images

The picker doesn’t render product images itself — your theme’s native gallery handles that. Rentshelf only uses images in the admin dashboard and booking emails.

Pricing strategy — quick cheat sheet

Your situation	Mode to pick	Variant setup
Fixed packages (3-day, 7-day, 14-day) with set prices	Predefined (tiered)	One variant per duration, priced accordingly
Single per-day rate, flexible duration	Manual + Daily	One variant with the per-day price
Flexible duration but longer bookings get a discount	Manual + Tiered	One variant + tier rules in the rental product page
Flat fee regardless of duration (e.g. event rental)	Manual + Fixed	One variant with the total price, duration still selected for availability

Tip

If you’re unsure, pick Predefined durations with 3 or 4 variants. It’s the simplest experience for customers and uses Shopify’s native variant pricing so totals always match at checkout.

Next up

Move to Configure a rental product to link your first product.