A marketplace where roof pod hire becomes a safer, more automated rental operation.

The marketplace keeps Sharetribe's booking foundation but adapts it entirely for physical equipment hire — with rental-specific transaction states, protected data handling, and UI behaviour calibrated for luggage pod rentals. Customers book over a date range, see a full cost breakdown before checkout, and move through delivery, return, and completion flows designed for physical equipment hire rather than a generic service booking template.

A custom deposit model was implemented supporting two distinct operational modes based on hire duration. For shorter hires, the deposit is handled as a card hold — authorised at booking and released on clean return. For hires exceeding 29 days, the system shifts to an amount-charged-and-refunded model — with logic enforced in both the frontend booking UI and backend transaction event handlers to apply the correct deposit behaviour automatically based on booking length.

The platform supports both explicit customer-initiated deposit payment and automated deposit capture flows triggered later in the booking lifecycle. This gives the operator flexibility when a standard booking moves into a longer-hire scenario requiring stronger financial coverage — without forcing customers through an additional manual payment step where it can be avoided.

Beyond basic checkout, the backend manages a full suite of Stripe financial operations: PaymentIntents for main bookings, SetupIntents for deposit card storage, security deposit capture and release, booking extension payments, provider transfers to connected Stripe accounts, downstream payouts, refund creation, payout reversals, and transfer reversals. This makes the system closer to a rental operations engine than a standard marketplace checkout — with every financial event tracked, reconciled, and auditable.

A custom MongoDB layer was built to record all marketplace transactions, transfers, payouts, refunds, deposit intents, remaining balances, and event history — giving the operator durable, retry-safe visibility into money flow outside Sharetribe's native transaction record alone. This separation of concerns is one of the project's defining architectural qualities: Sharetribe provides the marketplace primitives, while the custom MongoDB layer turns those primitives into a financial operations record with full audit history.

Stripe webhooks are handled by the Node.js backend to reconcile transfer and payout reversal events in real time — updating the MongoDB ledger and triggering appropriate recovery flows when payment events occur outside the standard booking lifecycle. This ensures financial state in the platform always reflects actual Stripe state, even across failure scenarios.

Once provider transfers become eligible, cron-driven payout workers locate valid connected Stripe accounts, create payouts, and persist the payout outcome to the MongoDB ledger — closing the loop between customer payment, provider earnings, and back-office bookkeeping in a way the base Sharetribe template does not provide out of the box.

The platform includes automated communications tied directly to booking lifecycle events — not static marketing sequences. Abandoned-booking reminder emails recover incomplete checkouts. Pickup reminders are scheduled for customers before their collection window. For long-hire bookings, return reminders are scheduled around the booking end date once deposit conditions are satisfied. All scheduling is handled via node-cron with SendGrid for transactional email delivery.

The custom transaction event layer supports booking extensions and post-rental additional fee requests — covering late returns, extra usage periods, and damage-related outcomes that require a controlled financial path after the original booking has already been confirmed and paid. This handles the real-world edge cases that any physical equipment rental platform inevitably encounters.

The frontend is a server-rendered React application using route-level data loading and hosted Sharetribe configuration assets for branding, layout, translations, access control, and listing and search configuration. The Node.js server handles SSR, secure API routes, Stripe webhooks, and operational middleware. A separate MongoDB layer stores internal transaction-state models supporting financial workflows and reminder scheduling beyond what Sharetribe tracks natively. This clean separation of concerns is the project's defining architectural quality — Sharetribe provides the marketplace primitives, the custom backend turns those primitives into a pod-rental operating system with payment orchestration, recovery flows, and service automation.