It was natural in web 1.0 to sell goods: snarky t-shirts, craft supplies, a laptop. Providing photos, a description and pricing options to create a shopping area is now something we are all familiar with. If I asked you to draw a picture of an online shopping cart, you could probably do it pretty easily.
It is also natural that as we’ve maximized what we can do with shopping carts for goods (Coupon codes! Discount for sharing on social media after purchase! Voting and funding products that will be produced in the future!), as a society, we’ve turned our attention to services. How can we use the same shopping cart idea that we know and understand to buy services?
Everything from online therapy to putting together Ikea furniture to renting goats to ‘mow’ your yard. While we are still figuring out standards (How does this work? What information do we collect? How do we control quality?), there are marketplaces that are open now… and no doubt more to follow.
24 Sessions: Online Advice On Demand
Knowledge professions, like lawyers, therapists, coaches, and others, can increase their reach online by not only offering bookable services you can pay for online but can also participate in marketplaces like 24 Sessions. The most famous of these was Google Helpouts, which has since disbanded. There are more services like this here: http://www.diygenius.com/online-coaching-platforms/ It seems like different websites specialize in different kind of knowledge to serving from different locations. Ex: the guy above is the only American doing legal advice on this site while there are tons of people from The Netherlands and Belgium.
TaskRabbit: Having People Do A Set Task For You
If you’re not looking for knowledge so much as getting something done (like assembling furniture, running errands), websites like TaskRabbit allow you to contract with someone to get them done. I took the screenshot of paying someone to stand in line for you at a no reservations restaurant because I thought it was an interesting idea.
Amazon Services: Using Global Marketplace To Find Local Providers
This first came on my radar when I saw a news story about being able to ‘hire’ goats to come and graze in your yard. I love goats, especially mini-goats, but the idea of full time goat ownership intimidates me. That’s why I loved this idea.
This is not available in my area (actually no services seem to be) but as big companies like Amazon seek to partner with local service providers (that agree with their standards of course), I think what we’ll all have access to online will become more interesting. Sure, if you know a guy who has goats you can rent, it’s one thing to be able to search for them online but it’s another thing to offer something like this in a very searchable platform right where people can book and pay.
We all trust the internet more than ever before and with things like identity verification (AirBnB, Uber, etc.) of customers and providers as well as third party protection a book and pay interface provides, services are only going to become more popular online. Shopping carts may not have the same interface that we all understand now but we’ll be able to pay for things online we only dreamed of even a few years ago. In five years, we’ll all know what an online shopping cart for services looks like and be able to draw that too.
But sooner than that, I’ll have goats grazing in my yard while someone delivers my groceries and I have an online therapy session…in the same afternoon. I won’t lie, I am excited about this day. Mainly because of the goats.
If you’re a service provider, how do you plan on integrating any of these type of services into your business plan?
If you’re a customer, how has using these services been of value to you?