The three E’s of on-demand service
Posted on 3 May 2024 in General
There’s been a whirlwind of buying and spending transition with regard to start-ups and tech over the last few years.
The business world we operate in has been taken off the “shop floor” and moved onto our Smartphones. From our phones, we are now personally on-demand 24/7 and we can search for anything, pay for anything and command almost anything to be delivered to us at our bidding: from clothing to appliances to home cooked meals.
The latest digital era of online business has also taken the product out of the hands of the marketer and placed the power firmly with the consumer. With this in mind, we started our proudly South African on-demand online transportation business, Snapcart.
Our free app takes organising transport of goods (big and small) to the next level by giving both transporters and the client the interactive online functionality to submit / choose the best quote and organise their loads.
As with any innovative business, we’ve learned a lot in a short time. Here are the three E’s that have informed and highlighted our on-demand app journey so far.
1 Ethics
The term “on-demand service” is described by Breeze as, “Apps that pay you to accept task requests – usually through your Smartphone – and complete them in a timely manner,” and in the words of Forbes.com, these apps are the “wave of the future.”
So where do ethics fit in? Because the voice of the customer has become dominant, and customers are driving the cart on purchasing, it behoves any business to provide the most reliable, trustworthy and sustainable business proposition to the consumer. By the same token, the reverse is also true, as Irving Wladawsky-Berger says in his article Trust and the On-Demand Economy, “This brave new world has brand new holes through which people can fall: those who have lost trust or do not have the means to build it.” No trust or ethics, no sustainable business.
2 Economy
With over 200 transporters already on Snapcart’s books, there’s no doubt that the South African economy is ready for more and more on-demand options. It’s a win-win business proposition for both, or in our case, all three sides, of the business transaction.
How Snapcart works is simple: As a broker, we receive a small fee on each shipment processed, which is paid for by cargo owners. From the side of the client looking for transportation of goods (this could be, literally anything from an envelope to a car), they pay nothing extra and get to choose the quote that suits their timeline and their pocket best. It’s a sound economic model that’s fair to all parties.
3 Eco-Conscious
One of the rationales behind our Snapcart business, and the motivator of other local on-demand apps, to reduce the wastage of the past. Wastage of human resources, equipment, fuel, time and money. All of which place a burden not only on the economy but also on the environment.
On-demand does is what it says - creates a service when a service is required. The old transportation business model uses set routes where loads are carried one way on two-leg return journeys. The same problem applies to the courier industry. This is extremely wasteful. We’ve created a solution to this via Snapcart which ensures loads will be transported as and when needed.
In closing, some final words of insight from Wladawsky-Berger on the future on the future of on-demand:
“No longer do distributors compete based upon exclusive supplier relationships, with consumers/users an afterthought. Instead, suppliers can be aggregated at scale leaving consumers/users as a first order priority. By extension, this means that the most important factor determining success is the user experience: the best distributors/aggregators/market-makers win by providing the best experience, which earns them the most consumers/users, which attracts the most suppliers, which enhances the user experience in a virtuous cycle.”
Kobus van der Westhuizen
Snapcart Director