Dormant Asset Rental for Small Businesses: A Web-Based Digital Marketplace for SME Asset Monetisation

Abstract: Small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) in India bear a disproportionate financial burden from dormant assets — physical and technological resources that are owned but not continuously utilised. These assets, which include vehicles, machinery, professional equipment, electronics, and event infrastructure, depreciate in value while incurring storage, insurance, and maintenance costs without generating any compensatory revenue. This paper presents Rentify, a full-stack, role-based digital rental marketplace architected to address this problem by enabling SMEs to monetise their underutilised assets through a structured, trusted, and feature-complete online platform. The system is implemented using HTML5, CSS3, and vanilla JavaScript for the frontend presentation layer, Python Flask for the backend REST API, and MySQL 8.0 as the relational database. The platform supports three user roles — renters, vendors, and administrators — each with dedicated dashboards and precisely defined access controls enforced through JSON Web Token authentication. Key features include a multi-category product catalogue, a flexible booking engine with hourly, daily, and weekly pricing tiers, coupon-based discount management, a simulated Razorpay-compatible payment workflow, and a comprehensive transaction history module. The database schema comprises thirteen normalised tables designed to the Third Normal Form. Systematic functional testing across all three user roles confirmed the correctness of all fifty-five tested workflows. API response times averaged 42 milliseconds on a local development server, well within the 200-millisecond threshold for a responsive user experience. The platform directly addresses four research gaps identified in the existing literature: SME neglect in current rental platforms, absence of multi-category solutions, poor identification-to-rental integration, and lack of transparent earning models.

Keywords: Dormant Assets, SME Marketplace, Rental Platform, Flask, MySQL, JWT Authentication, Sharing Economy, Asset Monetisation