GearFlow is a construction equipment marketplace that helps connect buyers, sellers, contractors and OEMs from all across the US. GearFlow is a culmination of Luke Power’s seminal experience in the wholesale industry. In those years, he observed a pattern of unused parts and underutilized equipment in rental yards. This is where he got the idea of building an online rental marketplace. The idea was fulfilled in 2017 with the launch of GearFlow. As a rental marketplace, GearFlow allows sellers to create a storefront, list unlimited products, and manage everything using a dashboard reporting tool. Similarly, buyers can make bids, rent/purchase equipment, rate products/sellers and look up their order history using a separate buyer’s dashboard.

GearFlow’s Ascent To Success

With its launch in 2017, GearFlow became the first eCommerce platform for construction equipment rental businesses. In 2019, the company came under spotlight by successfully raising $1.1M seed funding. Luke Powers, Founder and CEO of GearFlow said the funds would be used to accelerate product development and the growth of his team. Not long ago, GearFlow also earned partnership with the prestigious American Rental Association(ARA), epitomizing the company’s growth and nationwide recognition.

How FATbit/Yo!Rent Helped Build GearFlow?

GearFlow’s requirement of an online rental marketplace found the perfect match in Yo!Rent. As a self-hosted, scalable and highly customized solution, Yo!Rent provided the basis for building GearFlow’s highly dynamic marketplace. Yo!Rent team applied key focus on areas such as better reporting to admin, customized subscription plans, and a provision for rental option to be set on/off from the back end. While the development went smoothly, major emphasis was applied in the designing phase to reflect GearFlow’s branding. This objective was achieved after many iterations. The final design manifests a consistent theme and seamless flow from one page to another throughout the website.

Technologies Used in Developing GearFlow

FATbit’s own framework/library and a set of coding standards were used to build the website. Some other technologies that were used in the development are as follows:

PHP version – 5.6 

MySQL version – 5.6 

HTML, CSS3, Ajax, JavaScript/JQuery 

IonCube Loader – 5.1.1 with extension ioncube_loader_lin_5.6

Third Party APIs

Deemly for Profile verification

TaxJar API

Google Location Services 

Nexmo SMS API 

ShipStation API

Social Logins – Facebook and Google

Final thoughts

GearFlow’s journey to success has been a quick one and a clear explanation for that is a solution built on the back of in-depth industry research. Credit should also go to the platform that served as the basis for GearFlow – Yo!Rent equipment rental software. It’s Yo!Rent highly customizable framework through which the idea of a powerful and tailor-made online rental marketplace was realized. Moreover, Yo!Rent is available at a very reasonable pricing, which made it the go-to-solution for GearFlow that didn’t have large funds to begin with.

Also Read: https://understandingecommerce.com/start-an-online-equipment-rental-business-in-the-uae/