What is unattended equipment hire?

Unattended equipment hire uses smart lockers or kiosks to let customers rent equipment 24/7 without staff. Customers browse available items on a touchscreen, pay by card or QR code, and a locker door opens automatically. The rental stays open against the card on file until the equipment is returned to a cell; cells can optionally be specified with weight sensors that verify the return automatically. KioskForce provides the complete system — hardware, software, payment integration, and remote management dashboard.

What kind of equipment can you rent with automated lockers?

Our lockers handle sports equipment (pickleball paddles, padel rackets, tennis rackets, golf clubs), tools and workshop gear (drills, saws, tool kits), event and leisure equipment (cameras, audio gear, camping supplies), and specialized items. Lockers are custom-sized to your equipment dimensions — the compartment size, not the item type, determines what you can rent.

How much does an automated equipment hire system cost?

A basic 4-8 compartment smart locker system starts at approximately US$8,000 including hardware and setup. Larger multi-venue deployments are custom-quoted based on locker count, software features, and integration requirements. Most venues achieve ROI within 6-12 months. We also offer lease-to-own options. Contact us for a quote based on your specific equipment and venue.

Is weight-sensor security standard, or an option?

It is an option, specified per cell when the order is placed. Weight sensors are integrated during manufacture and cannot be retrofitted in the field, so the cells worth verifying are decided before the machine is built — many venues fit them only to the compartments holding their most expensive equipment, and run the rest on the card hold alone. Where a cell carries a sensor, it records the weight of equipment when it's picked up. When the customer returns the equipment, the system compares the return weight against the pickup weight plus a tolerance margin. If the weight is too low (equipment missing or damaged), the locker door stays open and the system alerts venue staff. This prevents theft and ensures proper returns without requiring staff supervision.

Can I integrate the rental system with my existing booking or membership platform?

Yes. KioskForce systems support API integration with court booking platforms, membership management software, and payment gateways. The locker system can link to your member database so returning customers access equipment with their existing membership card or app. We offer optional mobile app access and white-label solutions for multi-venue operators. Integration scoping is part of our standard deployment process.

How long does it take to deploy an equipment hire system?

For a standard deployment with off-the-shelf locker configurations, expect 4-8 weeks from order to live operation. This includes locker manufacturing, software configuration, payment gateway setup, shipping, and on-site installation. Custom-sized compartments or custom software integrations may extend the timeline. We provide staff training and 24/7 technical support as part of every deployment.

Which cashless card readers do your hire lockers support?

Our standard build for hire uses a Nayax reader running the Marshall protocol, because Marshall's multi-session configuration allows the card to be authorised at pickup and settled after the return. Beyond that, MDB is the vending industry's standard interface between a machine controller and a payment device, and KioskForce lockers support the major MDB cashless terminals over it — Nayax, Cantaloupe, Vending on Track VendCoin, and the majority of other MDB cashless readers. Capability on any specific device is terminal-dependent, so send us the make and model, the MDB documentation its vendor publishes, and the country the machine will operate in, and compatibility is confirmed on your quotation rather than in general terms.

Do I have to use your payment system, or can I keep my existing processor?

You can keep your existing processor. VendCoin — built by Vending on Track, KioskForce's Australian parent company — is an option, never a condition of purchase — an existing processor relationship is a perfectly good reason to specify a third-party terminal instead, and it is supported over the same standard MDB cashless interface. One consequence to plan for: a third-party terminal is usually the only item in the cabinet that is not ours, so its warranty, firmware and replacement parts come from its vendor rather than from us.

Can the locker take QR or mobile payments other than WeChat Pay and Alipay?

Yes, subject to scoping. On-screen QR is native to the machine — the screen generates a code and the customer scans it with their own phone, no reader required — and WeChat Pay and Alipay are supported in eligible regions today. Because KioskForce writes the machine software in-house, QR and mobile payment methods we do not already support can be added: a local wallet, a domestic QR scheme, a national mobile-payment rail, or a venue's own membership app. Each is a project-scoped piece of development against that provider's API, scoped and quoted like any other integration. Send us the provider and its developer documentation and we will tell you what it takes.

If a customer pays by card, will I still know which item was hired?

Yes. Item-level detail comes from the machine's own telemetry, not from the payment terminal, so the KioskForce dashboard records what was hired, from which cell, by whom and when — for card transactions exactly as for any other method. Your processor portal answers a different question: whether the money settled. The receipt ID ties the two records together for reconciliation. This is the difference buyers notice too late on low-cost imported machines, where a card sale appears as an amount with no indication of which item left the cabinet.

How does the locker charge a customer who does not bring the equipment back?

By keeping the payment session open. Our standard hire build uses a Nayax reader running the Marshall protocol in its multi-session configuration: at pickup the customer's card is authorised rather than charged, the session stays open while they play, and settlement follows for the amount actually owed once the session is closed. Nayax supports settlement anywhere from one minute to 71 hours after the initial authorisation, which covers a customer who hires in the morning and returns after work. That is the mechanism behind the notice venues put on the locker telling players to return equipment or be charged — it is enforceable, not a warning the machine cannot act on.

Is your payment integration certified by the payment provider?

Yes. Nayax has certified KioskForce's equipment-rental integration for Marshall Multi-Session Payment. That certification applies to the equipment-rental use case rather than a standard vending transaction. Payment providers, acquiring availability and terminal capabilities vary by country, so we confirm the exact payment configuration for your market in the quotation.

Automated Equipment Hire — Self-Service Rental Kiosks & Smart Lockers

KioskForce builds 24/7 unattended equipment hire systems — smart lockers and self-service kiosks that let customers rent equipment without staff. Customers browse on a touchscreen, pay by card or QR code, and a locker door opens automatically, and the rental is held against the card on file until the equipment is returned to a cell — the standard build uses a Nayax reader on the Marshall protocol, whose multi-session mode authorises the card at pickup and settles after the return, up to 71 hours later. Nayax has certified the integration for the Equipment Rental machine type. Per-cell weight sensors are an option: where specified, the cell records pickup weight and verifies the return automatically, flagging missing or damaged items. They are integrated during manufacture and cannot be retrofitted, so the cells worth verifying are chosen when the order is placed. Lockers are custom-sized to your inventory — sports gear (pickleball, padel, tennis), tools, or event equipment — and deploy in 4–8 weeks. A basic 4–8 compartment system starts at approximately US$8,000, and venues typically recover the investment in 6–12 months through new round-the-clock rental revenue.

Unattended Equipment Hire: Turn Idle Hours Into Rental Revenue

Automated equipment hire replaces the staffed rental counter with a smart locker system that operates 24/7. Customers walk up, browse available equipment on a touchscreen, pay by card or QR code, and a locker door opens — no staff required. The rental is held against the card on file until the gear comes back, and compartments can be specified with weight sensors that verify the return automatically. KioskForce provides the complete system: hardware, software, payment integration, and remote management. Venues typically recover their investment within 6-12 months through new rental revenue and reduced staffing costs.

Courtside hire locker with paddles and balls loaded behind glazed compartment doors, touchscreen above and contactless card reader alongside — A live KioskForce hire locker at an Australian sports venue. Glazed doors let customers see what's in stock before they pay, the touchscreen handles selection, and the cashless reader takes the card. The notice beside the reader is the model in one sentence: return the gear to the locker after your session, or the card on file is charged.

How It Works: 4 Steps, Zero Staff

Step	Customer Action	System Action
1. Browse	Customer views available equipment on the touchscreen — with photos, descriptions, and pricing tiers.	Lockers display LED status: green = available, red = in use.
2. Pay	Customer selects equipment, pays by card or QR code (WeChat Pay, Alipay supported in eligible regions).	System processes payment, records the rental start time, and logs the compartment weight baseline.
3. Pick Up	Locker door opens automatically. Customer takes the equipment.	System records the pickup and starts the rental. On cells specified with weight sensors, the “out” weight is logged too.
4. Return	Customer returns equipment to any available compartment and closes the door using the same card/QR code.	The return closes the rental and releases the hold on the card. Where the cell carries a weight sensor, the return weight is compared to the out weight: match = complete, underweight = door stays open and staff are alerted.

Live Deployments: What This Looks Like On Site

More KioskForce hire lockers in service at Australian sports venues — not renders.

The same courtside hire locker installed on castors inside an open-sided shelter beside outdoor courts — The same unit in its shelter beside the courts. Heavy-duty castors mean the venue can wheel it under cover out of season or reposition it for a tournament without re-running conduit — the branded side wing doubles as a wayfinding sign from the court.

Six-compartment padel racket hire locker in customer branding, ready for dispatch — A padel club's racket hire locker, finished in the club's own livery and photographed before dispatch. Every unit is wrapped to the venue's brand, not ours — and it ships alongside whatever else the site needs, in this case a bean-to-cup coffee machine on the same delivery.

Hire and Sell From the Same Cabinet

You don’t have to choose. Any door can be designated for sale instead of hire — the cabinet runs both modes side by side, and the touchscreen presents them as what they are: a hire that must come back, or a purchase that doesn’t.

That matters because hire customers are your best retail customers. A player who just hired a racquet is the person most likely to need a ball, a grip, or a can of three — and they need it now, at the court, not on their next trip into town. Sending them away empty-handed is a sale you had and gave up.

Hybrid hire-and-sell locker: tall compartments for racquet hire, a bank of small pigeon-hole doors in the middle for selling balls — A typical hybrid build. The tall compartments hire racquets out and take them back; the bank of small pigeon-hole doors across the middle sells balls outright — different ball speeds priced separately, one per door. Two revenue lines, one footprint, one screen.

The layout follows from what you’re selling:

Door type	Typical use	Why the size
Tall compartments	Racquet, paddle and bat hire	Sized to the longest item you issue — the gear stands upright and comes back to the same class of cell
Mid-height drawers	Multi-item hire sets	A set (racquets plus balls) issued and returned as one unit
Small pigeon-hole doors	Consumables for sale — balls, grips, overgrips, wristbands	One line per door, so each ball speed or grip type is its own priced selection

A few things worth knowing before you plan the mix:

The split is set at build, not in software. Door sizes are physical, so decide how many pigeon holes you want against how many hire compartments before the cabinet is manufactured. The mode of a door — hire or sale — is configurable afterwards; its size is not.
Sale items don’t need a return path, so a sold ball simply decrements stock. That makes retail doors the cheapest capacity in the cabinet.
Restocking is one job. Whoever refills the ball doors is already on site to check the hire gear, and both show on the same low-stock alert.
Retail pricing is yours. Set it per door, and change it remotely without touching the machine.

If you’re unsure of the ratio, start with more hire compartments than you think you need and a small block of retail doors — the sale lines you actually move show up in the first month’s data, and the next cabinet is planned from that rather than from a guess.

Paying at the Locker: The Cashless Device

The small terminal beside the touchscreen in the photos above takes the tap — but in equipment hire it is doing something a vending machine never has to do. At the moment the customer pays, nobody yet knows the final amount. The racquet might come back in an hour, or come back damaged, or not come back at all. The card has to cover a bill that isn’t written yet.

That is why the payment integration matters more here than in retail vending, and it is the one thing most locker suppliers gloss over.

How hire payment actually works: authorise now, settle later

Our standard build for hire uses a Nayax card reader running the Marshall protocol in its multi-session configuration. The flow splits payment into two halves:

Stage	What happens
At pickup	The customer taps. The card is authorised against the selection — the money is committed but not taken, and the door opens.
During the session	The session stays open while the customer plays. The machine is free to run longer than a vending machine’s normal transaction window.
At return	The peripheral explicitly closes the session and settlement follows for the amount actually owed. Nayax supports settlement anywhere from one minute to 71 hours after the initial authorisation.

Those 71 hours are why the model works. A session that stays open for most of three days covers a customer who hires in the morning and returns after work — and it means the sign on the locker in the photo above (“return your equipment or your card will be charged”) describes a real mechanism, not a threat the machine can’t enforce.

Nayax builds the multi-session configuration for exactly this class of machine — their own documentation names EV chargers, lockers and rental stations as the target. Note that Marshall runs over RS232 rather than MDB; it is a different integration from the standard MDB cashless interface described below, and it is the one that makes deferred settlement possible.

Certified by Nayax for equipment rental

Nayax has certified KioskForce’s integration for the equipment-rental application. The certificate identifies the following configuration, presented here in English for international customers:

Certification field	Value
Application	Equipment Rental
Payment configuration	Marshall Multi-Session Payment
Machine ID	127951031
Valid	31 March 2026 – 31 March 2028
Signed by	Nayax COO and Support Manager

This confirms the integration for an equipment-rental workflow rather than a standard vending transaction. Payment-provider availability and acquiring capability still vary by country, so the final payment configuration is confirmed for your market in the quotation.

Reader	Notes
Nayax	Our standard for hire builds, over Marshall for multi-session, or over MDB cashless for straightforward pay-up-front
Cantaloupe	Supported over the standard MDB cashless interface
Vending on Track VendCoin	Built by our Australian parent company — a payment and marketing system with loyalty and campaign features alongside tap-and-go and QR. An option, never a condition of purchase
Most other MDB cashless terminals	Supported. Capability is terminal-dependent, and confirmed against the specific make and model at quotation

Will my reader work?

This deserves a specific answer rather than a general assurance. Send us three things — the make and model of the terminal, the MDB documentation its vendor publishes for it, and the country the machine will operate in — and compatibility is confirmed on your quotation:

Check	What decides it
Interface	Whether the device presents a standard MDB cashless interface, and which MDB revision it implements
Physical fit and power	Whether it fits the cabinet position and its power requirement is met inside the machine
Acquiring	Whether the processor behind the terminal is licensed to acquire transactions in your market

The third check is the one buyers most often skip, and the one that bites — a terminal can be electrically perfect and still be useless because its processor doesn’t operate in the destination country. Confirm it with the processor before the cabinet is built.

One hire-specific addition to that list: ask whether the terminal and processor support deferred settlement at all. A reader that can only take a fixed amount at the moment of the tap will handle a pay-up-front hire perfectly well and cannot support a hold-and-settle-on-return model.

QR and mobile payment, including methods we haven’t built yet

Not every payment method needs a reader. On-screen QR is native to the machine: the screen generates a code for the transaction and the customer scans it with their own phone, which does the work a reader would otherwise do. WeChat Pay and Alipay are supported in eligible regions today, and because this is software rather than hardware it can be enabled or disabled per machine from the dashboard after deployment.

More usefully for anyone outside those markets: we write the machine software in-house, so QR and mobile payment methods we don’t already support can be added. A local wallet, a domestic QR scheme, a national mobile-payment rail, or a venue’s own membership app — extending to one is a project-scoped piece of development against that provider’s API, scoped and quoted like any other integration, not an off-the-shelf module we can promise blind. Send us the provider and its developer documentation and we will tell you what it takes.

That matters in hire specifically. Players and members reach for whatever their phone already has; the venue that only accepts a card leaves the walk-up customer standing at the locker.

Where the money and the sales data live

Two systems, answering different questions:

Your processor’s portal (Nayax, Cantaloupe, or whoever acquires) answers did the money settle.
The KioskForce dashboard answers what was hired, from which cell, by whom, and when — and it does so for card transactions too, because item-level detail comes from the machine’s own telemetry, not from the payment terminal. This is the difference buyers notice too late on low-cost imported machines, where a card sale shows up as an amount with no idea which item left the cabinet.

The receipt ID ties the two together for reconciliation.

Full detail — the compatibility matrix, MDB revisions, offline behaviour, and the cash side — is on the payments page.

KioskForce vs Traditional Staffed Rental Desks

What Most Venues Do	What KioskForce Delivers
Staff at a counter — only open during business hours	24/7 self-service — revenue even when the venue is closed
Manual inventory tracking on paper or spreadsheet	Real-time inventory dashboard, automated low-stock alerts
No security beyond staff watching the counter	Card held until the gear is returned, with optional per-cell weight sensors that catch theft and damage automatically
Fixed pricing, hard to adjust	Dynamic pricing tiers: hourly, daily, membership, peak/off-peak
No data on what’s renting or when	Usage analytics: know which equipment rents most, at what times, by which customer segments
Expanding means hiring more staff	Expanding means adding more locker modules — same management dashboard

Equipment Categories We Automate

🎾 Sports Equipment

Automated rental for pickleball paddles, padel rackets, tennis rackets, golf clubs, basketballs, and more. Perfect for sports venues, community centers, and recreation facilities. Browse our sport-specific solutions:

Sport	Solution Page	Best For
Pickleball	Pickleball Equipment Hire	Dedicated pickleball venues, community centers
Padel	Padel Equipment Hire	Indoor/outdoor padel clubs
Tennis	Tennis Equipment Hire	Tennis clubs, public courts

🔧 Tools & Workshop Equipment

Rent power tools, hand tools, and workshop equipment through self-service lockers. Ideal for makerspaces, university workshops, and tool libraries. Each compartment is sized to your largest tool, with weight-sensor security for expensive equipment.

🎪 Event & Leisure Equipment

Rent cameras, audio gear, camping equipment, or event supplies. Our lockers can be configured for any equipment shape or size — we design the compartments around your inventory, not the other way around.

Why Venues Choose Automated Equipment Rental

💰 24/7 Revenue Without Adding Staff

The single biggest reason venues switch: your equipment earns money while you sleep. A 10-court pickleball venue with an $8,000 locker system typically generates $8,000-9,000/month in net rental revenue — with zero additional staffing cost. Early-morning players, late-night sessions, and walk-in tourists all become revenue opportunities.

🔒 Weight-Sensor Verification — Optional, Specified Per Cell

Staffed counters lose money to unreturned equipment and unnoticed damage. Every rental carries an audit trail as standard — who took what, from which cell, when, and against which card — and the card stays on the hook until the gear is back.

Weight sensing is the optional layer on top. Where a cell is specified with a weight sensor, it also records pickup weight and return weight, so equipment that isn’t returned or comes back damaged is flagged immediately rather than at end-of-month inventory. Sensors are integrated during manufacture and cannot be retrofitted in the field, so the cells worth verifying are chosen when the order is placed — many venues fit them only to the compartments holding their most expensive equipment. Two similar items sharing a cell can’t be told apart by weight alone, so the record is cell-level rather than item-level. See dispense reliability for how verification methods compare.

📊 Real-Time Analytics, Not Guesswork

Know exactly which equipment rents most, peak usage hours, revenue per compartment, and customer return rates. Use this data to adjust pricing, restock popular items, and justify expansion to management.

🌦️ Weather-Resistant, Outdoor-Ready

Our lockers use PC (polycarbonate) doors and weather-resistant construction — rated for outdoor installation at courtside. The courtside unit pictured above runs year-round in an open-sided shelter beside outdoor courts. Rain, sun, and temperature swings won’t stop your rental operation.

What to Expect: Deployment Timeline

Phase	Duration	What Happens
Consultation & Design	1-2 weeks	We assess your venue, equipment inventory, and requirements. Lockers are sized to your items.
Manufacturing	2-4 weeks	Lockers are built to your compartment specifications. Software is configured for your payment methods and branding.
Shipping & Installation	1-2 weeks	Lockers are shipped to your venue, installed, and tested. Staff training is conducted on-site or remotely.
Go Live	Day 1	System is live. We monitor the first week of operation and provide 24/7 support.

Standard deployment: 4-8 weeks from order to live operation.

Flexible Investment Options

We offer two paths — buy outright or lease-to-own:

Option	Best For	Details
Purchase	Venues with capital budget	One-time investment. Full ownership from day one.
Lease-to-Own	Venues wanting to prove ROI first	Lower upfront cost. Monthly payments. Ownership transfers after term.

Contact our team for a customized quote based on your venue’s equipment types, volume, and integration requirements.

Get Started

Ready to automate your equipment hire? Here’s what happens next:

You reach out — tell us about your venue and equipment
We design — compartment sizing, payment setup, software configuration
We build & ship — 4-8 weeks to live operation
You earn — 24/7 rental revenue, zero staff overhead

Contact Us for More Information