How to set up photo booth backdrops as rentable items

Backdrops are a genuinely tricky product to sell properly, especially double sided ones. Physically, a double sided backdrop is one item, it can’t be booked out twice, since it can’t be in two places at once. But to a customer choosing between a red side and a blue side, it needs to feel like two separate choices, not one confusing product with an extra step attached.

BoothBook handles this using product variations, letting you list a double sided backdrop as a single product that shares one pool of stock, while still displaying each side to the customer as its own option.

Setting up a backdrops category

Head to Products and create a category called Backdrops. Every backdrop you add from here goes into that category, which is what lets you display them together to the customer later, whether that’s on a booking form or inside the client portal.

Adding a backdrop

When adding a product, you don’t have to build it manually. You can point it at the website your backdrop widget already runs on, and it will pull in the images and create the products for you. You can upload a photo of your backdrops if you’ve got them laid out in a gallery somewhere. You can describe them by voice instead. Or you can add each one manually if you’d rather.

Whichever route you take, give the backdrop a name, assign it to your Backdrops category, upload its image, and add a description and a product SKU.

Under Quantity and Stock, mark it as a rentable item, since this is something a customer rents and doesn’t keep. Then enter how many you actually have, three, for example, if you’ve got three silver sequin backdrops.

Under Pricing, set the price and whatever tax rate applies.

That covers a standard, single sided backdrop.

Setting up a double sided backdrop

Double sided backdrops need their own step, and this is where variations come in.

On the product, go to the Variations tab and click Add Variation. Give the variation a name, Side works well here, since what you’re actually varying is which side of the backdrop is showing. Add your options underneath, Red and Blue, for example, if you’ve got a backdrop that’s red on one side and blue on the other.

Tick Override Price, Stock and Image. This reveals a Combinations table underneath, with a row for each option you’ve added.

Leave Price, Stock and SKU blank on both rows. You’re not overriding those, since the whole point is that both sides share the same underlying stock, it’s one physical item either way. All you’re overriding is the Image, uploading the red side’s image against the Red row and the blue side’s image against the Blue row.

Because stock isn’t duplicated per variation, both sides draw from the same shared quantity you set on the main product. If you’ve got three of these backdrops, once three combined bookings have taken either side, neither Red nor Blue shows as available any more, exactly as it should for something that physically only exists in three copies.

Displaying backdrops on your booking form

Open your booking form, click the plus icon to add a field, scroll down, and choose Product.

On that field’s settings, open the cog icon. Set the category to Backdrops, set the display type to Backdrops, and set variations display to Separate.

Separate is the important one here. It lists Red and Blue as their own individually selectable items, rather than grouping them under one product that then asks the customer to pick a variation afterward. Once this is set, your backdrops display properly on the form and a customer can choose directly, with availability still correctly tied to that shared stock underneath.

Letting customers choose a backdrop after booking

If you’d rather let a customer pick their backdrop after they’ve already booked, rather than during checkout, this can live in the client portal instead.

Go to your client portal settings, then the Settings tab, and add a custom icon. You’ll be asked to choose between an external link and a product group, choose product group. Select your Backdrops category, and name the icon Backdrops.

This adds a Backdrops icon to the customer’s portal navigation. From there, they can open it, choose their backdrop, and it gets added straight to their job.