The transportation industry is very special for one thing, it really matters WHO you work with.
A lot of your business is likely through affiliate work. If your affiliate network is trustworthy and your farm in and farm out practices efficient, you can make a lot of extra money.
Let's say you receive a trip outside of your service area, or for a vehicle you don't own or that is not available.
Instead of losing the lead, you can work with someone else in the industry to fulfill the trip. Imagine you receive a call for an SUV airport trip, but you are fully booked, you can farm out this ride to an affiliate who is available.
You charge the customer and keep ~20% of the revenue and give 80% to the affiliate.
The benefit for you is that you didn't have to prepare the vehicle and hire the driver. The benefit for the affiliate is that they didn't have to do any marketing or lead acquisition, and simply do the right. So if done right it's truly a win-win situation.
But we all know that things don't always go smoothly. So read these tips below.
The biggest problem with farming out rides is payment. The industry has been through a huge shock with the pandemic, and it's more important than ever to treat each fair. Pay out your partners right after the trip and avoid ling back and forth communications and headaches.
Since there are now 3 parties involved (2 affiliates + Customer) make sure that everyone has the same information. For example if you're in touch with the customer, and the customer changes the pick up location, ensure that the affiliate is aware. Moovs Farm in and Farm out system, makes this effortless, since everyone is working on the same system. If you change anything, it automatically updates for everyone involved.
If you are farming in a ride, meaning an affiliate calls you to send a ride, you should give the affiliate a better rate than the end customer. The reason for this is that the other operator is taking over some work for you, like the marketing, the customer communication and the dispatch. Usually affiliate rates are about 20% cheaper than your regular rate.
Pro tip: Never double farm out, it only leads to headaches and rarely works efficiently.
After speaking with over a 100 operators in US, we build our farming feature based on real feedback. There were many pain point transportation business owners were having with farming out and farming in rides. Our modern software is build by software engineers that have worked the best technology companies such as Google and Facebook.
Here are the best reasons how Moovs helps with farming:
