How to Build a Cleaning Services Website – A Complete Guide

How to Build a Cleaning Services Website – A Complete Guide

Views - 3065
Leave a Comment

 Last Updated: 30th October, 2024

The gig economy is expanding and providing lucrative work opportunities to diverse service industries, including the cleaning services industry. Marked with a CAGR of 6.83% in the forecast period 20230-2030, the cleaning service industry is expected to reach $633.18 billion by 2030. Delivering its services to residential and commercial establishments such as homes, office buildings, restaurants, hotels, and hospitals, the industry’s future looks bright. 

Furthermore, the industry received a boost during the lockdown period of 2020-2022 because of strict cleaning and disinfection regulations that skyrocketed the cleaning services demand globally. Because of its nature, the industry remains invulnerable to even the most drastic market fluctuations. This is where the idea of launching a centralized cleaning service marketplace arises where multiple cleaning service providers can sign up and deliver their services to highlight themselves amongst competition and increase online presence.

Several examples of cleaning service marketplaces are available in the industry, such as Helpling, MyClean, Housekeep, Handy, and TaskRabbit. In return for connecting service providers with customers, these marketplaces primarily charge a small commission rate for revenue generation. Let’s take a closer look at how you can build your cleaning service marketplace along with the industry outlook and business model.

Why Launch a Cleaning Services Marketplace?

The following factors can help you analyze the scope of business in launching a cleaning service marketplace.

Organize an Unorganized Sector

The cleaning service sector is primarily unorganized in numerous regions. Organizing the unorganized not only holds business potential but can also help you open new business opportunities for independent service providers and cleaning services. This inadvertently benefits the entire cleaning services community and gives your marketplace a word-of-mouth boost.

Cater to Diverse Service Areas

As stated above, the cleaning service industry delivers services to diverse areas that include both residential and commercial cleaning. Furthermore, many new specialty cleaning service areas are also emerging. These include but are not limited to:

  • Green cleaning
  • Bathroom cleaning
  • Carpet cleaning
  • Car cleaning
  • Window cleaning
  • Medical cleaning
  • Kitchen cleaning
  • Corporate cleaning
  • Pool cleaning
  • Gym Equipment cleaning
  • Pressure washing

Increase Online Presence

Back in the day, cleaning service professionals grew their business via word-of-mouth marketing, which is still as effective today but less prevalent because of reasons such as the busy occupied schedules of working professionals and the emergence of individualistic societies where citizens have less time for face-to-face connections. Instead, as the internet grew, the reliance on building an online presence also grew. A cleaning service marketplace can assist all service providers in increasing their online presence.

Provide More Convenience to Customers

In a world where the internet has taken over pretty much everything, it has become the primary platform to search for solutions. For finding cleaning service providers, customers also prefer searching on the internet and placing a direct booking instead of connecting and checking the availability of multiple professionals. On a cleaning service marketplace, they can easily find diverse professionals and book them directly, ensuring a hassle-free booking experience. In case of any post-service issues, they can directly raise their concerns on the marketplace. 

Cost-Effective Business Venture

Building a cleaning services marketplace does not require you to own any inventory or hire any cleaning professionals. You only need to monitor operations over the marketplace. This makes the entire business venture highly cost-effective. There are no inventory costs and warehousing costs involved, the hired workforce is small and utility bills are low. The only primary expenditure that you will need to bear as the cleaning services marketplace owner is the technology infrastructure costs.

How a Cleaning Services Marketplace Works?

The actual workflow of the cleaning service marketplace varies on business preferences, market preferences, and the available technology. For a brief overview, we have given an exemplary workflow below:

Operations Workflow of a Cleaning Services Marketplace

  • Independent service providers and cleaning companies create their profiles on the marketplace
  • Customers upload their job requirements on the marketplace and service providers place their bids
  • Customers browse the profiles of all service providers who placed their bids. They thoroughly go through their work proposals, experience, portfolio, and bid amount to select a winning bid.
  • To finally select a cleaning services provider, customers submit the service cost on the marketplace itself
  • The marketplace deducts its commission and transfers the rest of the amount to the service providers’ eWallet
  • The service provider connects with the customer and completes the job
  • Once the service provider reaches the minimum withdrawal threshold amount, he can withdraw all his earnings to his bank account. 

Business-Model-Cleaning-Services-Website

Alternatively, some marketplaces also have a direct hiring option that bypasses the entire bidding process. The direct hiring model works in two ways:

  • Hourly Costs: Service providers and companies mention their hourly rates on their profiles. Customers explore their profiles and directly hire the required service provider on an hourly basis.
  • Service Packages: Service providers upload packages with fixed prices on the marketplace. Instead of hiring them on an hourly basis, customers buy their service packages and the providers deliver the services. 

Revenue Model of a Cleaning Services Marketplace

Diversification in income streams is required to ensure steady returns and become profitable. On a cleaning services marketplace, the marketplace owner can use the following revenue generation channels:

  • Service Commission: Marketplace can charge a commission rate on all services
  • Sales Commission: You can also charge a commission on the sales of service packages
  • Featured Listings: To showcase some service providers in the most highlighted areas of the marketplace, you can charge for featured listings.
  • Pay-Per-Click Ads: The PPC model can also be used on a marketplace where different service providers and third-party advertisers can create an ad account. On every click or sale that takes place through an ad on the marketplace, the ad fee will be automatically deducted from the advertiser’s account.
  • Paid Registrations: To earn upfront revenue and make the marketplace less reliant on sales, the admin can keep the registration paid. He can also use a freemium model: Free for independent service providers and paid registrations for cleaning companies.
  • Own Services: Lastly, the marketplace owner can list their own cleaning services on the marketplace.

Leading Cleaning Service Marketplaces in the industry

The following cleaning service marketplaces have been delivering online services in the industry for years and have successfully distinguished themselves from the rest of the competition. To launch your own cleaning service marketplace, you can take a reference from these marketplaces:

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

Roadmap to Build Your Cleaning Services Marketplace

After thoroughly understanding the business model and market dynamics, you can move forward toward developing your cleaning services marketplace. There are multiple development approaches to select from with each having varying benefits. From a business perspective, let’s analyze which approach will provide more value to entrepreneurs. 

Step 1: Select the Development Approach

Primarily, you get two approaches, which are either using custom development or readymade software. These approaches can be further divided into the waterfall development method, agile development method, and SaaS software and self-hosted software. However, we would highly recommend opting for readymade self-hosted software because of the following reasons:

  • With custom development, you would be paying hourly rates to each developer assigned to your project. This makes the custom development approach very costly. Moreover, the long delivery timeline also deprives you of any first-mover advantage.
  • With SaaS solutions, you do get readymade support for your cleaning services marketplace but they aren’t sustainable. SaaS solutions have monthly recurring costs with limitations on transactions, listings, user profiles, and features. To grow your business, you will need to upgrade to premium SaaS subscriptions costing hundreds of dollars every month.
  • Self-hosted software are hosted on your own choice of server and come with a lifetime usage license. This makes them highly cost-effective in the long run. Additionally, there are no such restrictions as present in SaaS software. You can onboard as many users, create unlimited product listings, and do limitless transactions, making your marketplace highly scalable and ready for all stages of growth. 

Thus, out of all the options, self-hosted readymade software provide the benefits we are looking for, including readymade support with a feature-rich architecture, long-term cost-effectiveness because of their one-time cost, and reduced time to market.

Step 2: Features to Look For in your Cleaning Service Marketplace 

To ensure the proper functioning of your cleaning service marketplace, you need a thoughtful set of features that can help you deal with numerous business use cases and streamline daily operations.

  • Social Sign-up: Multiple sign-up methods including social sign-up through users’ existing Gmail accounts and Facebook accounts will simplify the onboarding experience and improve the registration rate.
  • Custom Registration Form: Once users sign up, you need the functionality to display a custom registration form. The form will include all custom fields that you feel are required to do cleaning business operations on your marketplace. These can include identity details, profile user name, previous work experience, services provided, languages spoken, and more.
  • Company Profile: Along with individual service provider profile creation, you can also allow users to create company profiles. This will make your marketplace more attractive to existing cleaning companies from whom you can charge higher commission rates or offer paid features.
  • Multiple Job Types: For diversification in jobs, allow customers to upload different types of cleaning jobs including biddable jobs, fixed-price jobs, public jobs, and private jobs.
  • Bidding Module: Through the bidding module, service providers and cleaning companies can send their job proposals and bids on various jobs. The job poster can view each proposal and select the winning bid. 
  • Service Packages: Along with posting jobs, users can buy the various service packages uploaded by service providers. Each package enlists whatever is included in the package.
  • Direct Job Invitation: At the time of job posting, allow users to send direct invitations to various service providers. In the case of private jobs, direct invitation is also the only method to reach out to service providers.
  • Job Cancellation Window: To avoid paying marketplace commissions, users may attempt to strike off-platform deals with service providers. To prevent such deals, you should have the option to select a custom job cancellation window. Once the cancellation window is over, the cancellation option will no longer be available to users.
  • eWallet: The eWallet system will help you maintain a cash flow on the marketplace. All earnings can be displayed in each service provider’s eWallet, and you can set the minimum withdrawal amount and interval period to ensure smooth earning withdrawals.
  • Internal Messaging: The internal messaging system is required on the marketplace to allow efficient communications between service providers and customers.
  • Multilingual Filter: Add a multilingual filter on the marketplace to make it more welcoming for users from diverse backgrounds.
  • Commission Management: The option to set your commission rate and apply it on a global level or per service provider basis. 

You should look for the aforementioned features in your readymade software. You can either find these on the software’s official website or might need to book a personalized demo. Once, you find the readymade software, you can purchase its lifetime usage license and start building your cleaning services marketplace.

Step 3: Configure The Marketplace

After purchasing the lifetime license, your software provider will deploy it on your selected server, which can either be an in-house server or a third-party hosting service like AWS. Once deployed, you can start configuring the marketplace. 

Consider the following checklist to configure the marketplace:

  • Brand logos and other trademarks
  • Color schemes
  • Navigation menus
  • Homepage content
  • About us page
  • Contact us page
  • Terms and conditions
  • Bank details
  • Commission settings
  • Social media handles
  • Discounts and promotions
  • FAQs
  • How to Get Started blogs and guides

The entire marketplace configuration can take anywhere between 2-10 days. You can also speed up the process by preparing webpage content in advance. Once configured, create test profiles on the marketplace to review workflows and other processes.

Step 4: Onboard Cleaning Service Providers 

On any online marketplace, the number of customers is directly proportional to the number of cleaning service providers and vice versa. This requires you to have a well-thought service provider onboarding strategy, including various incentives for new registrations. 

To encourage more registrations, the following are some incentives and marketing campaigns that you can implement on your cleaning service marketplace.

  • Provide zero or lower commission rates for the first few service provider registrations.
  • Provide free featured listings and header section advertisements.
  • Conduct outbound marketing to personally reach out to cleaning companies and register them.
  • Run search engine ad campaigns to improve your marketplace’s visibility to customers.
  • Use print advertising such as newspaper ads and magazine ads to attract local cleaning service providers.
  • Launch social media marketing campaigns to boost your online presence.
  • Publish press releases on dedicated PR websites that distribute your news to a large news network.
  • Build social proofing by collecting reviews and ratings.
  • Grow your word of mouth by taking help from business connections, family, and friends.

For more information on how to attract cleaning service providers, you can take reference from this blog. 

How Yo!Gigs Can Help

Yo!Gigs is a dedicatedly developed end-to-end service marketplace solution. Unlike other software solutions that are more or less page builders, requiring you to manually do a lot of customizations, Yo!Gigs provides comprehensive support right out of the box. Along with all the essential features mentioned above, Yo!Gigs come with a highly professional and intuitive design that helps you establish a strong brand image and provide the best in the industry customer experience.

Additionally, Yo!Gigs caters to all use cases that you may encounter during your cleaning service marketplace operations. It helps you overcome various challenges and provide more flexibility and freedom to customers. Let’s take a look at all the top reasons to select Yo!Gigs.

  • Self-hosted software available at a one-time cost, making it highly cost-effective in the long run.
  • Supports direct hiring, job posting, bidding operations, and even service packages.
  • Fully customizable to meet any additional business requirements.
  • Comes with unlimited listings, transactions, and user profiles so that you grow and scale your business effortlessly.
  • Comes with an advanced set of features that help you deal with daily business use cases.
  • Comes with 12 months of free technical support to ensure uninterrupted business operations.

See Yo!Gigs in Action

Conclusion

Cleaning service marketplaces primarily gain popularity because of two reasons: the sheer number of cleaning service providers looking for new jobs and the convenience they provide to customers. To meet both of these criteria, a proper execution of your business model is required. This includes paying focus on technology, services, branding, customer support, vendor onboarding, and more. While growing any marketplace business takes time and effort, the right software, you need to direct your time and efforts in the right direction. You can get a better understanding of the market in less time and start providing quality services, which further helps in reaching the breakeven point faster.

Disclaimer: The Blog has been created with consideration and care. We strive to ensure that all information is as complete, correct, comprehensible, accurate and up-to-date as possible. Despite our continuing efforts, we cannot guarantee that the information made available is complete, correct, accurate or up-to-date. We advise - the readers should not take decisions completely based on the information and views shared by FATbit on its blog, readers should do their own research to further assure themselves before taking any commercial decision. The 3rd party trademarks, logos and screenshots of the websites and mobile applications are property of their respective owners, we are not directly associated with most of them.


Leave a Comment