Carts and Products

Which products in a cart are eligible for checkout through topi, and who manages the logic?

Rentable or not?

topi determines what is rentable.

(topi currently focuses on electronics and plans to add other verticals.)

Provide topi with a catalog (via the API) of all the items you sell. topi then determines which products can be rented.

For items that aren't available for rental, topi offers the "buy now" option so customers can check out mixed carts.

Mixed carts

A mixed cart is a cart that contains both products that can be rented and products that can be purchased.

For example, a company wants to buy a MacBook, a newspaper subscription, and a drilling machine. With topi, the customer checks out all items at once. The MacBook is set for rental, while the other items use the "pay now" option. The payout works the same for sellers: you receive the entire payment from topi, and topi handles the payment with the customer.

The "Pay now" option

A customer might want to buy a product instead of renting it, even when renting is an option. topi supports this and lets the customer choose it on the topi Hosted Checkout.

For some products, customers prefer to own them rather than rent and return.

Accessories are a good example. A customer checks out an iPhone 14 and an iPhone 14 Case. They can rent the phones and buy the cases outright.

By offering "buy now" on rentable products, topi means the customer does not need to check out once with topi to rent the phone and a second time without topi to buy the case.

Unsupported products

topi does not currently support a small set of product types. These products are neither rentable nor purchasable via topi, so remove them from the cart before checkout.

In technical terms, as we'll see later, you cannot create an offer with a cart that contains unsupported products.