712 Storage Place

THE PROBLEM

712 Storage Place rents storage units, and the work of running the facility repeats every time a unit turns over.

Somebody asks what is open, settles on a unit, signs for it and starts paying, and that cycle runs again for as long as the doors are there.

All of it used to run on phone calls and paper. A customer could not look at the facility or start a rental without getting somebody on the phone, and the record of which unit belonged to whom lived wherever it was last written down.

The software side was its own problem. Storage software is sold by the door, as a subscription that keeps charging for as long as the facility is open, and it is built for chains rather than for one operator running one site.

WHAT WE BUILT

We built the site on WordPress with WooCommerce, and we host it and maintain it.

Behind the site we built the backend system the facility is managed from. Every unit is tracked in one place, so what is open, what is reserved and what is occupied is a record rather than a question somebody has to go and answer.

The two halves are one project. The public side is where somebody finds the facility and starts a rental. The backend is where the owner runs it, and it was built around the way this facility actually works instead of around the feature list a national chain needs.

It was built once and the owner has it. There is no per door fee attached to it and no vendor deciding which parts of it a facility this size is allowed to use.

The hosting and the upkeep are ours. Updates, maintenance and the ordinary care of a WordPress install sit on our side, so the owner is not the person who has to notice when something needs attention.

THE RESULT

712 Storage Place has a site that represents the facility and a system behind it that the facility is run from.

Unit status lives in one place, so what is open comes out of the system rather than out of somebody's memory.

The software is the facility's own. What it cost was the build, not a subscription that grows with every door and never ends.