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Carts and Products

What types of products in a cart are eligible for checkout through topi, and who is responsible for managing the associated logic?

Rentable or not?​

The intricacies of what is rentable is managed by topi.

(Our current focus is exclusively on electronics, but we have plans to broaden our scope into various other verticals.)

As long as you provide us with a catalog (via the API) of all the items you sell, topi will take care of the logic to determine which products can be made available for rental.

For items that aren't available for rental, we offer the topi "buy now" functionality, providing customers flexibility when checking out with mixed carts.

Mixed carts​

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

An example: A company wishes to procure a MacBook, a newspaper subscription, and a drilling machine. With topi, the customer can seamlessly checkout all items in one go. The MacBook is set for rental, while the other items can be transacted using the "pay now" option. The payout logic remains consistent for sellers – you receive the entire payment from topi, and we handle the payment process with the customer.

The "Pay now" option​

Sometimes a customer might want to buy a product instead of renting it, even if renting is an option for that product; topi supports that and lets the customer choose this on the topi Hosted Checkout.

The reason is that for certain products, customers might find it more convenient to own them rather than rent-and-return.

Accessories are a good example of this. Imagine you have a customer trying to checkout an iPhone 14 and an iPhone 14 Case. They may choose to rent the phones and buy the cases outright, as they believe it would be more sensible for their business to do so.

In scenarios like this, by providing the option to "buy now" even on rentable products, topi ensures the customer does not need to checkout first with topi to rent the phone and checkout a second time without topi to buy the case.

Unsupported products​

While we work hard to support every product type for checkout, there is a small set of products that we do not currently support. These unsupported products will neither be rentable nor purchaseable via topi, and therefore, will have to be removed from the cart before checkout.

In technical terms, as we will see later, this means that you will not be able to create an offer with a cart that contains unsupported products.