Centralized marketplaces came to small business owners years ago with an enticing promise; industry leading technology, centralized distribution, and easy discovery. What’s not to like! Well, as time has revealed, there may be one fairly significant thing to not like—the cost.
In the hospitality industry, platforms like AirBnB and Booking.com can charge businesses fees as high as 20%. For restaurants, DoorDash, UberEats, and others double-dip by charging both small businesses and their customers fees.
This is a serious burden on your SMB clients, many of which are already struggling with increasingly tight margins. In fact, it can be such a burden that many business owners must be asking themselves “is the squeeze still worth the pour?” Or, more specifically, is listing on these platforms with it?
Right now, these platforms are somewhat unavoidable for many businesses. Modern consumer behaviors unfortunately mean that a certain number of customers are going to start their search using a central marketplace. However, there is still room for your clients to reclaim their margins. What if the technology they depend on—whether booking or delivery—could be embedded into their own website?
This greater level of interactivity would empower your customers to compete with big, centralized marketplaces by offering a better, more focused experience without being forced to share profits.
LODGEA is a prime example of this strategy. They’ve integrated their first-party booking solution into customer websites, enabling them to accept bookings directly from their customers. The result? A 30% increase in direct bookings.
LODGEA has long offered a high-quality booking engine, but their customers wanted a little more. They wanted direct booking with design flexibility and ease-of-use—they essentially wanted a website builder with booking built right in. That’s exactly what interactive websites promise.
The execution is simple, yet genius. LODGEA maintains all of their customer’s properties and property availability in their databases. Customers can update these properties, manage their calendar, and more all from LODGEA's core product. However, embedded within their platform is a complete website builder. This website builder communicates directly with LODGEA’s database to dynamically update website content without any client intervention.
That means when a customer updates a property within LODGEA that update is populated everywhere, including their own website. That also means the end-users, the client’s customers, always get the most relevant, real-time information. A win-win.
Old, brochure-style websites no longer convert like they used to. It’s not enough to list a phone number or a simple contact form, consumers are demanding interactivity—and they’re rewarding it too. Interactive content generates two times as many conversions as passive content.
Think about your clients’ sites. Are there elements published on them today that could be made interactive?
