How to Build a Cleaning Services Website – A Complete Guide

 Last Updated: 29th December, 2023

Cleaning the house is a laborious chore and people these days do not have a lot of time and energy to do it by themselves. Particularly, the working professionals leave their home cleaning tasks to cleaning services providers without any second thought in their mind.

This trend offers a good opportunity for entrepreneurs to cash in some extra income by starting a cleaning service-based business. The global cleaning services market size is expected to reach $468.2 billion by 2027, registering a CAGR of 6.1% from 2020 to 2027, according to a report by Grand View Research, Inc.

Clearly indicated by the numbers, cleaning services have already had a major impact on the gig economy and will continue to do so in the years ahead. These growing numbers are one of the main reasons entrepreneurs are looking to get into this business. Moreover, being one of the most flourishing markets out there also makes it a more lucrative business opportunity for entrepreneurs.

This article consists of a detailed breakdown including market scope, ongoing trends, opportunities, challenges, and much more to make it easy for the entrepreneurs planning to join this industry.

How Does a Cleaning Service Website Work?

A cleaning website connects clients looking for cleaning services with cleaning service professionals. Cleaning services encompass a wide range of services such as window washing, floor cleaning, vacuuming, furniture cleaning, carpet cleaning, air duct cleaning, water damage restoration, and other similar services. These services are used by both commercial and residential customers.

Key Niches in The Cleaning Industry

The application of cleaning services is increasing across new segments of the economy. Here are some major niches in the cleaning industry where entrepreneurs can plan to expand their services.

Residential Cleaning

Shortage of time is the biggest driver to push the residential cleaning industry. While in the past, this service was availed mostly by elderly people, reports suggest that people in their 30s-50s are also appealed by this service these days. The reason for this gaining popularity is people get to spend time with their families instead of fussing over the chores at home.

Commercial Cleaning

Commercial cleaning reigns as the most promising and profitable segment of the cleaning industry as employers have realized the importance of providing a conducive and clean working environment for the well-being of employees. The on-demand commercial cleaning jobs will be the most popular segment in the near future and will definitely come in handy to cash in some extra revenue.

Specialty Cleaning

Most people have no idea how to clean rugs and carpets at home. Moreover, the way cleaning services deep clean the carpets is no way possible by the homeowners, even if they use vacuum cleaners. Specialty cleaning providers offer professional cleaning of windows, floors, carpets, sofas, etc.

Ongoing Trends in Cleaning Industry

Trends in any industry evolve with time as the needs and expectations of consumers change. Similarly, it is necessary for the cleaning businesses to keep abreast of the industry trends and adapt modern practices to fulfill the latest demands of the market. Below discussed are the current trends in the cleaning industry to be kept in mind by the aspiring entrepreneurs of this industry.

Improved Hiring & Training Practices

The on-demand cleaning services market is becoming increasingly competitive because of which, consumers don’t hesitate to switch one cleaning service provider with another if they are not satisfied with the service. The cleaning companies need to emphasize more on hiring and training the employees to make sure they are capable of offering quality service to the customers.

Also, many industrial and commercial businesses prefer to work only with the vendors who provide national background checks of their employees to ensure the safety of the clients. Thus, it becomes essential for businesses to screen the candidates properly using the industry standards before hiring them.

Healthier Indoors

The general public’s increased concern over health has made the cleaning companies more focused on creating healthier indoor environments rather than cleaning only for appearance. The cleaning professionals are expected to hold higher standards of cleaning when public health is concerned. Focus on using technologies, products, and processes that meet the health and safety standards is required to remain compliant with the regulatory rating organizations.

Vendor Specialization

The consumers look for a single entry point to avail themselves of a wide range of cleaning services. This makes it vital for the cleaning companies to offer specialized services like HVAC cleaning, carpet cleaning, etc. along with general services. To take advantage of this growing trend of vendor consolidation, the cleaning companies need to market themselves as capable of meeting all of their customers’ needs.

Building a Cleaning Services Website

The demand for the cleaning services marketplace is constantly growing. Yet, there’s still a lack of awareness as to what goes inside in building a website. In this section, we’ll take a step-by-step look at the process of building a cleaning services marketplace.

Determine Your Cleaning Niche

The cleaning services can be divided into two categories.

• Residential cleaning services
• Commercial cleaning services

Residential cleaning services are essentially house cleaning services. The target audience for this niche are homeowners or busy renters who are looking for help with cleaning tasks around their homes. Residential cleaning services include:

• Pool cleaning
• Backyard cleaning
• Move-out cleaning
• Post-renovation cleaning

Commercial cleaning services are required by various organizations like government offices, private businesses, etc. This is more challenging than residential cleaning services as you need to negotiate complex, enterprise-grade contracts to stay afloat. However, commercial cleaning businesses are less vulnerable to economic fluctuations. Commercial cleaning services include:

• Office cleaning
• Post-construction cleaning
• Sanitization
• Medical cleaning
• Gym & sports facilities cleaning
• Entertainment venue cleaning

It’s quite evident then, that you need to carefully pick a niche and plan your operations accordingly.

Understand Your Target Audience

Comprehending your ideal customer and target market is another critical element of your cleaning business. Not knowing your target audience will fail your marketing efforts. Begin by creating your user persona, which accounts for what they do, where they live, how they act, etc.

Doing this will help you better connect with their problems, interests, and needs and you will be able to communicate with them in a better way. This will definitely give the right direction to your marketing efforts. 

Decide Feature List

Try to make the marketplace simple and smart for both service providers and seekers to browse the website easily and make the transaction effortlessly. There are different types of users in a marketplace that require different features. At the same time, features of all these user types should coordinate and respond to actions performed by each other.

Let’s have a look at the essential features of the cleaning services website.

Search & Compare

Implementation of a robust search and compare feature is vital in a cleaning marketplace. Customers should be able to easily find and narrow down the list of service providers who meet their criteria. Furthermore, customers should be able to compare the shortlisted candidates before requesting quotes or further inquiries.

Simple Signup Process

Keep the signup process transparent, short, and straightforward for the customers as well as vendors so that they can complete the registration process in minimum time. Too many steps and complications can discourage a user to register on your website and you can lose a potential customer.

Review/Rating

It is a known fact that customers check out previous reviews prior to purchasing any goods or services and testimonials hugely influence their buying decisions. Therefore, by integrating a review and rating section in your marketplace you can build the trust of the consumers on your platform.

Integration with Payment Gateways

Your marketplace should offer multiple payment gateways to users that have a global currency and compatibility with eCommerce platforms. Having payment gateways make it easy and smooth for the customer to make the transaction directly from the website. PayPal, Stripe are some of the popular payment gateways that can be considered to integrate.

Reports and Analytics

It is essential to analyze the user experience of your website along with tracking to identify the weak links in your business. Prompt analytics like user behavior, abandoned purchases, user actions, preferred services, session time, etc. can help the business owners to know where to put focus and how to retarget the lost customers.

Apart from these, there are many other features required by the cleaning services marketplace to survive in today’s cut-throat competition. However, it is suggested to always start by building an MVP with the most important features like payment processing, user profiles, listings, etc., and test the waters instead of fleshing out a fully-featured website at the initial stage.

Building a Cleaning Service Website can be done in two ways

1. Custom build from scratch
2. Use readymade software

Building the cleaning website from scratch will allow you to build everything from start to finish and customize it as per your requirements. However, it is quite a time-consuming and costly affair for cleaning companies as it requires them to have the technical knowledge and a team of developers. Building a cleaning business website using readymade service management software is an easy way that does not require any technical knowledge.

You will be able to set up your website in a short span of time with all the basic features. And, once it has gained sufficient popularity, you can also incorporate advanced features as per the requirements. The cost and time taken to build a cleaning website using readymade software are much less when compared to building from scratch.

Successful Cleaning Services Businesses

We have been observing the cleaning businesses across the globe and came across a whole lot of interesting ones. Let’s have a look at our compiled list of top cleaning services businesses.

Company	Established Year	City	Funding	Top Investors
Helping	2014	Berlin	$97 Million	Phenomen Ventures, Lakestar, and Point Nine
Book a Tiger	2014	Berlin	$36 Million	German Media Pool, DCM, and Moacon Ventures
Properly	2014	San Francisco	$9 Million	Keyword Venture Capital, AccorHotels, and Fabio Cannavale
The Minte	2017	Chicago	$9 Million	Math Venture Partners, Network Ventures, and Blue Note Ventures
SweepSouth	2014	Johannesburg	$4 Million	Black Coffee, Seed Engine, and Futuregrowth
Freska	2015	Helsinki	$2 Million	Acton Capital Partners, Harald Aalvik, and Lasse C. Smedsvig

Attracting Customers to Your Cleaning Services Business

Now that you know how to build a cleaning services website, the next step is to grow your client base. But how do you find these clients and convince them to avail services from your website? It can be easier than you think. Let’s have a look.

List Professional Service Providers

The professionals listed on your platform should offer good quality services from the very beginning much before you start marketing your platform. Make sure they use a cleaning checklist and follow the standard process at every visit to deliver the same results every time. Communicating with the clients is the key to building a successful business.

Following up on estimates, discussing problems (if any), sending invoices immediately after the job is done are some ways to maintain good communication and relationship with your clients.

Advertise Your Business

Apart from identifying your clients and offering great services, your business also requires some marketing strategies to perform at its fullest. Social media presence, online advertising, email marketing are some of the popular ways to convert a potential customer into a paying one. Moreover, you can offer discounts, promotions, and other incentives to encourage people to sign up on your platform.

Create Referral Programs

People trust their friends and family when they recommend a service instead of a random advertisement they watch. Start a referral program and ask your loyal customers for a referral. Invite them to share their experience with their friends and family. Also, make sure you thank them for their referrals in the form of discounts or gift cards.

Encourage Online Reviews

As soon as you deliver a service, make sure you ask your client to leave a review that can significantly help you bring in more clients. However, before asking for the review, ensure the client is happy with the service provided. A happy client is more likely to give you a genuine and positive review.

Possible Challenges of a Cleaning Services Business and Their Solutions

A number of challenges may occur while managing a cleaning services business. It is, therefore, suggested that the business owners prepare themselves beforehand. Let’s discuss a few challenges and their potential solutions.

Building Trust Among Clients

Homeowners are quite overprotective of their house and their belongings. Handing over their house to a stranger is a matter of great trust. A cleaning service business owner cannot guarantee the behavior and quality offered by the service provider, which means that the business owner should be ready for complaints, conflicts, and even lawsuits.

Solution: Business owners are required to strive hard to maintain a good reputation for their business. It is advisable to use practices like ID and background checks, skill tests, training, and certification before hiring any service provider. Business owners can also charge fines for late-coming and no-shows.

Clients should be able to see a picture and bio of the service provider at the time of booking to feel safer about a stranger entering their house.

Booking Out of Platform

Once your platform has a good list of service providers, the risk of professional leakage increases. If the client is satisfied with the services offered by a service provider booked on the platform, they try to hire him directly outside of the platform in less price.

Solution: The solution to combat this situation is quite hard. The professional service providers are looking for better compensation. And, the clients are always in search of cheaper service providers. Business owners can try to offer competitive salaries to the service providers and involve clients in their loyalty programs.

Transparent Policies with Service Providers

Business owners can try to have minimum to no misunderstanding between them and the service providers. A case like Homejoy can arise where service providers demanded several employees’ benefits like salaries, tax payments, insurance, leaves, and many more. 

Solution: Before you allow service providers to work on your platform, make their rights, obligations, Terms and Conditions are crystal clear to them to avoid any issues in the future. Make sure you set fair rates and make the payments process transparent and timely.

Summing Up

To sum up, building a cleaning services website is a profitable idea and the giants of this industry have already proved that. All you need to do is your homework and market your platform to the right people. Despite the competition, you can achieve the same results as Helping and Handy.

FAQ

Q1. Are there any readymade solutions to start a cleaning services business?

Yes, there are many readymade solutions in the market. Yo!Gigs is also a cleaning service solution. It differs from other solutions in scalability and hosting. Being a self–hosted software that can be hosted on any server of your choice, Yo!Gigs is a fully scalable home services software. In Yo!Gigs, there are no limitations on the number of listings, transactions, and user profiles. Additionally, you get access to all advanced features right from the beginning. Yo!Gigs lifetime usage license is available at a one-time cost with 1 year of free technical support.

Q2. Cost to build a cleaning services marketplace?

The cost of developing a cleaning services marketplace depends on the type of software technology you select. You have three options:

1. Developing the marketplace from scratch: This method is the most cost-inclusive as it requires you to pay for developers on an hourly basis. Furthermore, the entire project can last up to a year. Thus, the estimated development cost via this method is $10,000 – $20,000.
2. Use SaaS software: SaaS software includes monthly or annually recurring costs. However, these costs are never-ending. You may end up paying thousands of dollars just for the software within the first few years of operations. Lastly, there may be certain limitations that require you to upgrade your subscription package for scalability purposes. Estimated costs are $4,000 to $15,000 for a period of 5 years.
3. Use Self-Hosted Software:  The majority of self-hosted software come with a perpetual license at a one-time cost. As there are no restrictions on the number of listings and features, there are no package upgradation costs. Estimated costs are $1,500 to  $5,000 for a lifetime license.

Q3. How to choose the best on-demand cleaning services marketplace software?

There’s no definite approach to selecting a services marketplace software. To ensure the software will be helpful for your needs, check out its feature set and book a personalized demo to understand how the software will work for your requirements. Lastly, try to opt for sustainable software that you can easily use for the long term (5-6 years minimum) so that you don’t have to reinvest in your software tech. Usually, self-hosted software meets these requirements as they are available at a one-time cost, saving you thousands of dollars in the long term.