Taxi Driver Online

Thanks JD,

I would agree... there is a great deal of refinement required to make it a workable service, but anything is possible .

Many thanks as always for your input.

Kind regards

Pete

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I find in my experience that this happens quite often with phone bookings and as a rule you are going to get one very upset customer if you do try and amend the price it is often easier to throw in the extra drops for free then there's no hastle getting paid unless of couse c & D are miles out of the way

Another point to bear in mind is that what are you going to be charged for accepting work off the quote platform ? There was one one being promoted at the trade show a couple of years ago and they were asking for thousands of pounds in fees for joining and continuing membership only large companies in big cities could even hope to get the sort of returns on that level of investment

Edders,

With regards to your first point... I understand it might be easier to accept the drop off's and not charge... but the 2 points I am making are that 1. You should be entitled to make that decision & 2. The same situation arises on phone bookings so it would not be a "new" issue. In fact, as mentioned with an internet booking you would have black & white confirmation, so there could be no arguments with regards to whether it was mentioned... only whether it should be charged for.

With regards to your second question, I have not come across any that offer membership at the outrageous fees you mention there. I have come across a few that want a couple of hundred notes annually to access the quotes and seemingly no guarantee on what you get back. An unacceptable situation I would say. If I signed up 10 companies/individuals for a single area an charged them each £200, I would need to be able to guarantee generating them each £400 in return for it not to be considered a rip off... and even that is a dubious investment to be honest (also by the very nature of quoting, it would be impossible to guarantee as one company could win all the business by quoting stupidly low). That assuming jobs were split evenly would mean generating over £4000 of quotes in 1 area, the liklihood would need to be triple that. A target that I don't think anyone could guarantee other than in the very busiest of towns/areas.

I would envisage a situation where there would be no enrolment fee, no quoting fee and a small value based fee for the individual that won the quote. I have no idea on what that would be as it would depend on what technology was employed to make the system friendly and better than any other, I would expect to see things like postcode look-ups for accuracy, speed and ease, free SMS notifications of quote requests & quote response in your area (to stop you having to log on and check every other day) maybe even as far as an sms gateway response system so you can reply to the text with a price and you don't need to log on at all, possibly operator profiles & feedback ratings, plus quote statistics, plus images of vehicle(s) things like that, that would allow Joe Public to make a decision based on more than just £££. There are endless options to do something like that properly, plus 6 months of development work, testing etc...

The beauty of a system like that is no body gets [edited by admin] off, because it takes minimal time to quote, costs nothing unless you get work from it, so the onus is on us as a company to generate enough quotations to make the 10p per job income worth while... Also, with a "no cost to have a go" attitude, more people are likely to try it and therefore the better it is for the public... and a good service for the public very quickly can become a popular service for the public.

I've rambled a bit... but if there is anything more you would like to add, or anything you would like me to clarify, please let me know.

Many thanks as always!

Pete

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