Skimmers of the gig economy
The Problem
As Claytabase has slowly moved to fully limited company from independent contractor, we have noticed the huge growth in the number of comparison, rating and marketplace sites. While some companies may find them useful and a great source of work, it seems that they could also be construed as a growing menace to the traditional self employed and small business owners.
A bad review can seriously dent the reputation of a small business, however some companies seem to be held to ransom.by the thought of it.
The horror stories of someone threatening a bad review on TripAdvisor unless money gets taken off of a bill, checkatrade and ratedpeople in the construction and household services industries both charge a small fortune for leads or membership, and growing move into professional services too, where I came across bark, purely by accident.
I had recently developed the bromleyhandyman site, and we started receiving emails from bark about people needing plumbing and other services in the Bromley area, which would have been great, if we were in that trade and based in Bromley! We passed on some of the info to our client to see if it would be any use, and decided to give it a quick go.
We paid an initial £44 for 40 credits which we managed to stretch to a couple of responses. The average credits required for a web design job is 25 credits, which works out at about 5% of a low budget website price (£25).
This isn't to get the job, just the privilege of getting the contact details. We've tried a few, and the one person that did respond already had someone lined up for the work, he just wanted to make sure he wasn't getting ripped off, fair enough I guess, but it has cost us time and money for him to do that, and there could of been five others doing the same.
Our review on Trustpilot of Bark
I'm sure they are only trying to provide some sort of service that they think is being missed by people, but when you are working in trades or professional services then this just adds another layer of complexity we don't really need.
You advertise to get yourself to the first place on Google, then expect the people doing the work to pay for an unqualified lead to see if they are even serious. You bombard us with these leads all day by email as if to suggest that there are lots of people looking for our services.
From what I have seen, some people have been using just to get an idea of what the price could be for some work but have no intention of even getting back to them, others are not really that serious in getting work done, some are chancers who expect work done at cost price, and some can't even be contacted, and some, as per the reviews say they get bombarded by calls!
If I were a credible consumer looking for a local service I would recommend Google and Facebook. If it is purely to get quotes, then don't expect a huge amount of professionals to pay 5% of their fee to a third party just to get contact details for you.
If the idea was flipped slightly, and the quotes could be sent over in anonymous fashion, and only paid for when won, then it may become a viable product, I'd look at paying slightly more per lead, else it will be a flash in the pan skimming off of the gig economy and self employed as they realise the only people making any money are bark.
Solution
Should we or could we fight back as companies against this kind of practice? Looking at some of the emails over the weekend, it seems that no one is responding to these on Bark anymore, so it could be a start.
It is understandable that these companies want to make money, but could a fairer system be implemented?
- Charge a higher commission rate to the bid winner - trust runs both ways!
- More transparent system, whereby the people raising the quotes can see what else was sent in (after a decision was made), and can see who was chosen.
- Differentiation between quote types or a level system. Serious/Comparing/Idea of cost etc, would enable us to provide a different level of service for each, help or advice etc.
- Differentiation between qualified and non-qualified quotes.
Some of it is good
We are all for there being a way of differentiating between good and bad companies, and the web is a great place to do that, but the prevalence of these sites has saturated the market so much that actually all we see is a watered down version of the truth, and it has become a way of customers getting services for prices that barely cover the work done.
