Chico Tote Rentals delivers reusable plastic moving totes to your door, then picks them up when the move is done, so nobody has to buy, assemble, and flatten a garage full of cardboard. The business launched from zero: no logo, no photography, no website, no booking system. We built the brand and the entire moving box rental platform for Chico, CA and Butte County, from the first sketch of the logo to the checkout that takes payment.
The Challenge
- A brand-new business needed a complete identity and a website that could do the selling on day one
- Renting physical totes means real inventory: the site had to know exactly how many totes are out on any given day and stop overbooking before it happens
- Customers needed to reserve moving totes online end to end: pick a package, choose delivery and pickup dates, and pay, without a phone call
- Delivery and pickup pricing varies by town across a 30-mile service area, and the fees had to calculate themselves
- The case for totes over cardboard had to be made with numbers, not slogans
What We Did
We designed the brand and built the site as a custom web application, deployed on edge infrastructure for speed. The heart of the build is the booking engine: every reservation claims totes across its full delivery-to-pickup span, and the availability logic checks that every single day of a new rental still has room under the real tote inventory. The same rules run in the booking form, the API, and the test suite, so the calendar the customer sees is always telling the truth. If a date is full, customers can join a waitlist, and when totes free up the system issues a discount code automatically.
Checkout runs on Stripe, with tote rental pricing and packages sized for everything from a studio to a five-bedroom move, plus add-ons at booking. Delivery and pickup fees price themselves per leg based on each address: free in Chico, Durham, and Paradise, with distance-based fees across the rest of the Butte County service area. An admin area gives the owner full control of bookings, returns, the waitlist, and discounts.
To make the sales case, we built an interactive cost calculator comparing cardboard boxes to renting totes that prices out a real move, boxes, tape, time, and all. The site also ships with town-by-town service pages, moving guides, and dedicated pages for realtors, students, and office moves, giving search engines a reason to rank the business for every kind of local move.
Results
- A complete brand and booking platform launched from nothing, live at chicototerentals.com
- Real-time, date-accurate inventory that makes overbooking impossible and fills cancellations from the waitlist automatically
- Self-service reservations with Stripe payment, automatic delivery fees, and add-ons, no phone tag required
- A cost calculator that turns “why not cardboard?” into a number the customer works out for themselves
- Local SEO structure built in from day one: town pages, guides, and audience pages for every corner of the service area
