On Demand Business Model #3- Choice vs Anonymity

This blog is the part of Juggernaut Special Series on ‘Understanding On Demand Business Models’, where we reviewed different facets of On Demand Business Models

 
Irrespective of whether you go ahead with aggregated or integrated supply, one design choice, that is a part of business model, is giving the end users the ability to select the service provider vs the user being reliant on the platform for the best possible match. This choice at some levels can depend on the vertical that you are operating in, but there are many ingenious ways of going in either direction irrespective of the vertical.

As a rule of thumb, higher the differential in service or product quality from one choice to another, say a marketplace for on-demand beauty solutions/beauticians, a user choice for service provider is more likelier to work vs an Uber type approach.

Another similar example could be a marketplace for freelance professionals, such as on ODesk or Elance or Freelancer.com, wherein the user makes the choice of end service provider, subject to platforms’ ability to predict user needs with help of parameters like ratings, hours worked, recommendations etc.

On the contrary, with services like Uber which promise a singular service, say taxi in this case, shall fulfill customer needs best by matching them to drivers driven by algorithms.

From operational perspective, optimized matching increases the efficiency of supplier side infrastructure. But you might need to invest more in training and vetting the supply.