The ride-sharing services are prevalent as commuters can gain the advantage of traveling at economical prices. In other perspectives, carpooling services will help in reducing traffic, reducing fuel consumption, which is not the case in ride-hailing services.
Though ride-sharing or carpooling services are known for these advantages, people have contradictions due to safety concerns. Yet, with the implementation of advanced security features in the ride-booking app, you can guarantee safe rides to your users. Let us move on to know the statistics of the carpooling marketplace and also the impact of the pandemic on the carpooling marketplace.
What is the core concept of carpooling services?
Taxi services differ from each other based on how it connects users with drivers. In that regard, carpooling services employ the shared concept in which multiple passengers travel in the same, but their destination will differ.
Insights on carpooling services – An overview
- As per the report generated by Statista, globally, there will be over 45 million cars that get registered for carpooling services.
- Another forecast states that carpooling services will grow at 16.6% CAGR and touch $185.1 billion by the year 2026.
- However, during the pandemic, carpooling services faced utmost challenges, as social distancing was a norm. The global carpooling industry saw a decline of 17% in growth during the year 2020 when compared to 2019.
- Uber faced a loss of $6.7 billion, Grab lose $0.8 billion, Lyft lose $1.8 billion, and Didi reported that it faced a loss of $1 billion in 2020.
How to start a carpooling service business?
Stage 1: Ideate your plans
In the initial stage, you will put your ideas into action by analyzing the target users. Generally, you will get input for your business plan only after examining their preferred taxi services. Whether your target users generate demand for carpooling services or not is the first thing you need to pay heed to. Without knowing whether there prevails a demand or not, you can start your carpooling services.
Stage 2: Identification of competitors
For any budding taxi service, Uber is the major competitor. Because Uber has been dominating other taxi services, both on-demand and traditional ones, over the years. If Uber is one of the taxi service providers in your target region, then you must rethink whether you can survive in that region or not.
Of course, any user will hesitate to shift from a reputed taxi service provider to a newly launched taxi service. Hence, take some time to establish your taxi services in other regions and then expand your services.
Coming to competitor analysis, you must know their offerings, customer base, and ride charges they apply. Analyzing your competitors is a must because, based on the analysis, you can set your unique selling points.
Stage 3: Frame value propositions
To pull taxi users and drivers by your side, you need to offer something valuable to them, which is termed value propositions. In on-demand taxi services, Uber stands as the forerunner because of two things. One is an easy-to-use and advanced taxi booking app. The other thing is the set of value propositions the company offers to its passengers and drivers.
Many taxi companies have replicated Uber’s value propositions and also developed a similar app. While you can frame value propositions based on your target users, their demographics and ensure to keep them unique and beneficial.
Stage 4: Business model
In general, taxi service providers employ either the aggregator model or establish their own taxi services. The aggregator model is where your app will list a diverse range of taxi service providers. From that list of service providers, users can choose the taxi service provider and initiate bookings. In this model, revenue from the commission is assured as service providers get users through your app.
In the individual model, you will start carpooling services on your own by employing cars and drivers. Here, users will book cars that are under your control. The aggregator model is prevalent and of course, it depends on your budget to decide which business model you choose.
For both the models, you can either develop the app from scratch or try a white-label solution like Uber clone app. Choosing the second option will help you to fast forward the app development.
Stage 5: Decide the minimum viable product of your app
You would have knowledge about the beta version, where the app is released on the app stores with almost all the features. Yet after the period of beta testing, the app will get some additional features. Similarly, the minimum viable product is where the app is launched on the app stores with a minimum set of features. The core purpose of the MVP is to test the working of the app and also know whether the app throws any glitch. So, for your reference, a list of features for your MVP has been provided. Take a look at it.
- Registration – Of course, registration is a staple feature of the app. Collecting the basic details of users for verification is the purpose of registration.
- Booking – Through this feature, the users will be able to reserve cars for their rides. For this, the location details are mandatory.
- Payment – To avail of the ride, users must make their payment after confirmation of the ride from the driver. For easy payment, the app should be pinned with different payment options.
- History – For reference, the past rides will be saved, and users can view them through the history feature.
- Review – How will you know your users’ feedback? For that, the reviews feature is necessary.
For drivers, the below list of features will be important as part of the MVP.
- Registration – For collecting the basic information of drivers, the registration feature will be important.
- Accept or decline bookings – Drivers can select any ride requests from the list of requests they receive. The declined requests will be passed to other drivers.
- Map – For moving from the current location of drivers to the user’s location, the in-built map feature is necessary.
- Earnings – Drivers are facilitated to check their commissions for every ride through the earnings feature.
Summing up, if you want to know the cost details, then you have to disclose a few things like the platform you have chosen to launch your taxi app, the number of features you have planned to add to the app, and other customizations. If you invest in the Uber clone app, the overall time for launching the app will be less than a week.
