In the world of the modern Indian man, taxi booking apps have taken precedence as a necessity more than a luxury. With the market valued at $39B, the taxi booking app market sees a significant influx of startups. Uber’s idea became a local reality in India thanks to Ola. Today, both are multinational giants in their regard.
Though the COVID-19 pandemic slowed things down for a long time, it is starting to pick up again and is pegged to grow at a CAGR of 2.47% to reach a valuation of $43B by 2026. So, if you are planning to enter that market, here is everything you need to know before you develop an app for yourself.
Competitor Analysis
Competitor analysis is the first step in identifying who you are going up against. In India, the taxi booking app market has been monopolized between Uber and Ola, owning 35% of the market. In the olden days, Meru was the only option for faster and wiser taxi booking, which was seen as the option for the elite. However, it has been reduced to just 5% of today’s total market share.
So, to have an edge today, you have to conduct your competitor analysis to make sure you can have a fair share of the taxi app booking market. To do a practical competitor analysis of a taxing booking app development company, take the following steps:
● Choose Your Top Competitors
List out the brands, individuals, and entities in your chosen space, both in the locality and segment.
● Describe Each Competitor
Write a summary of all competitors and what they offer to the customers.
● Describe Their Competitive Offering
What USP has made it a worthwhile investment for users and turned them into recurring customers?
● Summarize Their Online Presence
Understand how they segment their online presence to engage their customers and garner new ones.
● List Their Strengths and Weaknesses
During this process, you will understand your competitor’s strengths. But with careful analysis, you will also know what their weaknesses are. List them all out.
● Identify Your Opportunities
Once you grasp your competitor’s strengths and weaknesses, you can identify the opportunity area where you can segment your business.
● Identify Threats
Based on that opportunity segment, you can conduct a complete SWOT analysis to identify the areas that can pose your business as a possible threat to the competitors.
Who is the user, and what features do they need?
In the end, it is all about understanding who your users are and what features they expect from your taxi booking app like Uber. This means that you should look at your competitors’ capabilities and find ways to make them better. From a broad perspective, taxi booking app software has two kinds of users, the riders and the drivers. So what are the features they both expect?
For Riders
As a rider, customers expect the experience of booking a taxi to be hassle-free. This means that you have to make the overall experience easy, bug-free, and convenient enough than your competitors. Therefore, a taxi booking app like Uber has to excel at the game.
Features for Riders:
Here are the features that your taxi booking app software can give to its users:
- Searching a cab: Quick view of the cabs available in their area
- Booking a cab: Fast booking of the cab
- Ride arrival notifications: Arrival of the driver at the pickup location
- Review and rating a cab: Rating the overall experience of the cab ride
However, the increase in taxi booking app services users has opened up a scope of improvement. Other features they might expect that can help your taxi booking app to stand out are:
- Probable route to the destination: The route options are provided to the rider to decide which path they want to take.
- Availability in remote regions: A big struggle in tier 2 and tier 3 cities is to find a cab. You can solve this with taxi availability in remote areas.
- Lesser waiting time: Reducing the wait time for a cab can help increase customer delight and satisfaction, which increases the chances of them becoming recurring customers.
- More options for the shorter commute: For short-distance travel, choices such as auto-rickshaws, e-ricks, and 2-wheelers are made available for cheaper transport.
- Snacks and Quick bites for more extended travel: Travelers who want to travel longer distances over 30 Km. You can provide a pack of chips, and a bottle of water can go a long way to making them feel welcome in your cab.
For Drivers
There are many things on the line besides just livelihood as a driver. It is a means to garner more business, build credibility, and even help the company sustain itself. So, drivers must get what they want from the app before becoming regular on your taxi booking app. Some of the core features they expect are:
- Registration: Easy onboarding without any hassles and pitstops.
- Getting Bookings through the dashboard: A dashboard to manage and track all the rides they have completed and all the rides they are getting.
- Receiving payments: A gateway for processing payments through the taxi booking app, cash, or a digital wallet at a set time.
Features for Drivers
Taxi booking apps like Uber and Ola already offer these features and other benefits to drivers. However, you can still improve the business prospects of many drivers out there who are struggling to find work. Some of the features they may expect from a new taxi booking app are:
- Offer cars to drive: Some people can drive but do not have the means to purchase their vehicle. An app like this may offer cars to be driven on a daily wage basis, where a certain amount has to be paid from the driver’s earnings each day as compensation for driving the car.
- Offer better commissions: Most businesses take a certain percentage of the earnings the driver has made through their app. Most drivers are comfortable with that as long as it does not bite too much into their costs.
- Offer car checkups and services: One of the most significant pain points is the fast wear and tear of the car parts and the constant servicing it needs. Their drivers can schedule a routine maintenance visit once a month for their cars with the taxi booking app company.
- Offer benefits to the driver: The drivers can get other benefits like better health insurance with family coverage, provision for meals, and even bonuses around festival seasons like most corporate employees.
- Better GPS location of the riders: It will be easier for the driver and rider to find one another if the GPS location of the rider can be pinpointed more accurately on the map.
- More accessible routes with fewer stoppages: Though a longer ride usually spells higher revenue, carpool applications are not always valid. The path can become extensively wrong between pickups without increasing revenue in these cases. So, the app can offer a simpler route with lesser stoppages.
Conclusion
Developing an app to book taxis like Uber or Ola is a novel idea, but it’s harder said than done. There are a lot of factors to take into account before you dive into that endeavor, right from your product segmentation to the long-term sustenance of your business model. Additionally, the app should aim to improve the overall experience for all types of users while benefiting them.
So, if you want to cross those hurdles and get into the game with one of the best taxi booking app development services in the business, then look no further than Etelligens. With the right tools, developers, and analysts, you can explore all the facets of developing the app and even explore the opportunity areas in your business to generate more revenue.
