Three friends came together to solve an unserved market in their local community by creating Carmodity, a peer-to-peer car-sharing service. It allowed residents in Vancouver to rent cars easily while making the car owners money. They used Booqable to manage their rental system, giving them the proper organization they needed to grow their business.
Peer-to-peer car sharing is nothing new, but it is an excellent way to have a car when you need it and make money off it when you don’t. It has been found that it is cheaper than owning a vehicle yourself and contributes to fewer environmental emissions. Setting up car sharing on your own can be tricky, but with a company like Carmodity, you can achieve it stress-free. It’s not a typical use case for Booqable, but they made it work for starting their business quickly.
Carmodity
Carmodity was founded in 2019 in Vancouver, British Columbia, by three friends who noticed something about their friends’ cars. They realized that their vehicles sat idle for much of the week, and they could be earning money by renting them to other people. So they researched peer-to-peer car-sharing and decided to create Carmodity - a platform where anyone could list their car for rent in Vancouver.
They were approached by people who wanted to rent their car when it was not in use, negotiate contracts and list the vehicle on their site for a small commission fee. This allowed customers to rent out cars for days, weeks, or even months in some cases. In addition, they provided damage protection and cleaning services as add-ons to ensure the car’s owners were protected.
The owners of Carmodity were able to create a convenient and hassle-free process for people to list their cars and for customers to rent them. In their own words, they described that “unlike traditional car rental companies, at Carmodity, customers simply choose their car, make payment and then pick up the car without having to go through the administrative paperwork.”
Creating a peer-to-peer service
As you can imagine developing software as a sole user is a long and expensive process and isn’t ideal when you want to start your own rental business straight away. So, Carmodity looked for professional software that met their needs, and they came across Booqable. It allowed them to get started straight away without any hassle.
With Booqable, Carmodity was able to list available vehicles online by integrating Booqable into their website. This allowed customers to see every available car, choose a booking duration, choose pick up and drop off times that were convenient. Then, they could make a payment right away without waiting for approvals or filling out paperwork.
In the back-end, it allowed Carmodity to keep track of the earnings for each car, get detailed reports, generate invoices and charge customers for late returns. The latter was due to the integration of Stripe with their Booqable account and online checkout, giving them convenient access to payment collection.
Moving forward
While using Booqable for their rental platform, Carmodity achieved a customer retention rate of over 50%. In addition, they saw the number of new customers grow 20% each month, while revenue grew by over 30%. These results are awe-inspiring and showed that they were serving an under-met need within Vancouver.
Earlier this year, Carmodity decided to pivot their business model more towards financing than rentals. This meant switching to a piece of software that was more geared towards that sector. However, they believe they wouldn’t have been able to grow as quickly as they did or be in the position to make this pivot without Booqable giving them the start they needed.
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