Goodstock: taking over a complex equipment rental marketplace

The client

Goodstock: a Finnish marketplace where companies and private people rent and sell equipment, mostly to professionals in film and TV, theatre, dance, and photography.

The challenge

The marketplace is built on Sharetribe, but with much more than the standard template: invoice payments with their own transaction flow, a cart for many items, pricing for long rentals, and Finnish VAT on every price. A codebase like this has to be taken over without breaking any of it, and the marketplace was slower than it needed to be for its users in Finland.

The platform

What the platform handles:

• Pay by invoice for businesses At checkout, a company can choose an invoice instead of a card and enter its Finnish Business ID. Stripe creates the invoice with a 14-day payment term and VAT lines, and the seller is paid out automatically once it is paid. It works for rentals and purchases.
• A cart for many items Buyers add up to 75 rentals and purchases to one cart. Items are grouped by seller and type, and each group is checked out as one transaction with one payment or one invoice. Availability and prices are checked live.
• Rental pricing for longer periods Longer rentals cost less per day through a pricing table that runs up to 270 days, and each seller can set their own table.
• Finnish VAT throughout Each listing is marked with or without VAT, prices show «+VAT», and the VAT on the marketplace commission appears as its own line in the seller's payout. Both sides can download a PDF receipt.
• Price on request and custom offers Sellers can list items without a fixed price. In the conversation they send an offer with a price and rental days, and the buyer books at that price.
• Company identity across the marketplace Users sign up as a company or a private person, with a Business ID and industry. The company name replaces the personal name on listings, profiles, messages, and emails, and listings can be searched by company.
• Finnish translation and marketing tags Weglot translates the marketplace into Finnish, while user messages and names stay as written. Marketing and analytics tags run through Google Tag Manager.

What we did

We took over development and maintenance of the marketplace, as we do in project rescue. We moved the hosting closer to its users in Finland, and server response dropped from about 306 ms to about 109 ms. We also fixed browser caching, so the 1.7 MB JavaScript bundle is no longer downloaded again on every visit and repeat visits load faster.

The result

The marketplace kept every feature through the move, and server response became about three times faster.

We migrated our Sharetribe from another service provider to Gunars and IT House, and have been extremely happy with their work. Everything from communication to staging, development and service options has been premium quality and always on time.

Jere Saarelainen Co-Founder, Goodstock · Finland