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Supercycle is built inside Shopify, so you can offer rental and resale alongside your retail store and keep the checkout, payments, apps, and integrations you already use. This page explains what Supercycle adds and where it takes over.

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Supercycle and Shopify

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Methods

Methods are the ways you charge for the same item more than once. Supercycle supports four:
  • Calendar. Charge for a set number of days.
  • Subscription. Charge on a recurring basis until the item is returned.
  • Membership. Charge a recurring fee for an allowance of items that can be swapped in and out.
  • Resale. Sell items that aren’t new, usually identified by serial number.

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Inventory

Once a product is imported, Shopify stops tracking its inventory and Supercycle manages it instead. That’s what lets Supercycle track individual items and their availability, which rental needs when several orders are placed against one item across different dates.

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Items

Items are the individual units in your inventory. Each has a serial, so you can track its condition, status, and history over time. Attach the serial to the item with an RFID tag, barcode, or QR code to identify it in the warehouse or store.

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Availability

Supercycle’s allocation assigns each new cycle to the item that keeps the most future availability open for upcoming customers.

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Orders

Supercycle uses native Shopify orders, so whatever a customer checks out with becomes their order. An order can mix rental products on different methods with retail items. For each Supercycle-managed product in an order, Supercycle creates a cycle. A cycle is assigned an item and tracks that item’s fulfillment and receival. An order with several items creates several cycles.

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Returns

Returns are managed separately from Shopify’s returns. Shopify ties one return to one order, which doesn’t fit rental, where a customer may return items from several orders at once, such as on a membership. When a customer requests a return from customer accounts, Supercycle creates a return that isn’t tied to a single Shopify order, so it can handle those cases.