United Rentals: Mobile Ordering

The Client

Founded in 1997, United Rentals is the largest equipment rental company in the world, with a store network nearly three times the size of any other provider and locations in 49 states and 10 Canadian provinces.

The Situation

United Rentals had a rapidly growing user base for its native mobile apps, but in the past, the apps forced users to leave the app to place a reservation — a cumbersome and potentially frustrating experience. 

The Challenge

While its e-commerce website was responsive and could handle mobile resolutions, United Rentals wanted to deliver a mobile experience that felt like a native app experience. The company wanted to create a convenient, seamless online ordering experience for mobile app customers and get it to market quickly, leveraging its existing e-commerce site if possible. But building a full e-commerce experience, including the online product catalog, cart management, and checkout, in both Android and iOS would require a significant amount of time and development resources.

The Solution

United Rentals partnered with VMLY&R, and the team designed and created a new Drupal theme using limited navigation and updated UI components. Separating the theme from the main site using an alias in Acquia Cloud Platform informs Drupal that the user is opening the site from an embedded mobile browser in the app. VMLY&R ensured that cookies facilitated communication between the embedded site and the native mobile app controls, updating the UI badge counts or invalidating the app's data cache as the user makes updates in the web view.

The Results

Using Acquia Cloud Platform and Drupal allowed United Rentals to greatly accelerate its digital reservation rollout to a whole new customer segment on its mobile platform. In the first month post-release, mobile app-attributable revenue increased by 300% — a revenue increase that accounted for 25% of the year-over-year growth for the month of August.

Additionally, by leveraging its existing Drupal site, United Rentals was able to reduce its mobile app team’s development time by 3-4 months, allowing them to focus them on other new mobile app features.