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How rental stock works

When you make a product rentable, circuly needs to know how many units are available to rent at the same time. This is your rental capacity. Rental capacity is its own number, set per product. It is not always completely separate from your Shopify stock, though — that depends on how your store is set up:
  • On most stores, your Shopify sellable stock also counts toward what customers can rent. Selling units in Shopify leaves fewer to rent.
  • You can hold a share of that stock back for direct sales, so rentals never draw it down. Set this under Settings → Inventory, or per product on a pricing template.
  • Products you track individually always use their rental capacity on its own, regardless of Shopify stock.
You manage rental capacity under Shopify Admin → circuly Rental & Subscriptions → Rentals → Inventory.
You set a dedicated Units available to rent figure for each rental product. That figure is always the floor of what you can rent — the reserve setting only decides how much of your Shopify stock is added on top.

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Setting rental capacity

When you make a product rentable in the setup wizard, you enter Units available to rent — the number of units that can be out on rental at the same time.
1

Open the Inventory area

Go to Shopify Admin → circuly Rental & Subscriptions → Rentals → Inventory.
2

Add or open a rental product

Start the setup wizard for a new rental product, or open an existing one from the Inventory list.
3

Set Units available to rent

Enter how many units can be rented simultaneously. This number is your rental capacity and is tracked separately from Shopify stock.
4

Save

Save the product. Customers can now rent it up to the capacity you set.
You can change capacity later at any time: open the product from the Inventory list and resize it up or down.

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Pooled vs individually tracked units

Most rental products are pooled — any unit is interchangeable, so you only need to track a total count (for example, “8 helmets available”). If you need to follow each numbered unit on its own, individual tracking is an advanced option that lets you register every unit (for example, by serial number). For most stores, a pooled count is all you need. See Rental unit lifecycle for how individually tracked units are followed through handover, inspection, and repair.

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Shopify stock tracking must be off for rentals

Shopify controls whether a customer can complete the purchase at checkout, and that can silently block your rentals even when you have units free.
If a rental product’s variant has Shopify inventory tracking turned on and its policy is set to “Stop selling when out of stock”, then after a few normal Shopify sales, Shopify will mark the variant as sold out. At that point Shopify blocks customers from completing the rental at checkout — even though rental units are still free. To prevent this, the setup wizard will not let you make such a variant rentable until you fix it.
To make the variant rentable, fix its Shopify settings:
  1. In Shopify Admin, open the product and the affected variant.
  2. In the variant’s inventory settings, either:
    • Turn off “Track quantity”, or
    • Change the policy to “Continue selling when out of stock”.
  3. Save the change in Shopify.
  4. Return to the rental setup wizard and make the variant rentable.
Either fix works on its own — you do not need to do both. Turning off tracking is simplest if you don’t rely on Shopify stock counts for that product.

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Next steps

Rental setup

Walk through making a product rentable, configuring rental terms, and going live.

Rental unit lifecycle

Follow units from handover through inspection and back to available.