The emerging market so called Sharing Economy is not something new. It’s just an old fashion way of generating income, by opening your own shops/BnBs/Delivery Services/Cars-pool just like before the industrial revolution arises — It’s not completely true. So, What is Emerging Markets ? What is Sharing Economy ?
In the early days when I were little, I still remember that my parents were used to sell goods in the markets. The time passed by, the competition went faster than my parents have predicted. Suddenly, there were so many start-up delivery services appeared with cheaper and better services. This fact forced them to re-defined the way they generated income for the whole family. Opening a store/shop at that time was such a huge risky investment. Instead of delivering their goods from place to place, they tried to settled down and opened a store/shop which supplied people’s needs. On one hand, this could open up a new opportunity, if they could spot the people’s need and supply them with exactly the way they wanted to be. However, on the other hand, this could be the end of my parents business career if they couldn’t find exactly what people’s needs were at that time.
Therefore, they tried to diversify the business at the early stage. One advantage of diversifying your business is you could learn from what people’s needs surround your area and sell on those items with cheaper and better products without investing all of your capital only on one or two specific products. However, this could also limit the unique identity/characteristic of your store in the long run. Therefore, they run it only for at least two to three months and decided the final products that they wanted to sell.
In the nutshell, they settled down by dividing the type of products that they wanted to sell and only focused on one of them. The products that were sustainable from time to time (non-seasonable based products) and the products that were depending on the seasons (seasonable based products).
That’s pretty much all business knowledge that I learned from my parents in my early age. Above all, I also learned that there was no sharing involved in the economy at that time. It was more about trading among people themselves. Everyone tried to provide better/cheaper services and products to the markets. Since the whole markets ideas have emerged towards more sustainable and better economy for everyone, the idea of sharing economy arises. This sharing economy is not only minimizing the whole world consumption by sharing peoples’ resources, but also empowering people to be an entrepreneur in some point. All in all, that is the main difference between the old economy before industrial revolution and the new economy so called sharing economy that soon will emerge and transform the world into much better and more self-sustainable economy.
According to Ernest Gellner (1983), “the state constitutes one highly distinctive and important elaboration of the social division of labor and it is the specialization and concentration of order maintenance”. He holds that human history falls into three periods: the pre-agrarian, the agrarian and the industrial (Gellner, 1983).
In the pre-agrarian period, there was no state because the scale of people’s work is too small and labor division was not very needed; in the agrarian period, with the expansion of working scale, state started to emerge in most societies because of labor division; in the post agrarian and industrial age, the state inevitably exists in all the societies. Nowadays, the state starts to emerge in so called the sharing economy which is also known as Collaborative Consumption: is a trending business concept that gives consumers (you and I) the ability to buy or rent goods rather than buying them in a commercial sense.
So what is the Emerging Markets in Sharing Economy?
Today, a powerful sharing economy is emerging across the United States and around the world. Building on age-old roots but taking advantage of new online networks, innovative approaches to “collaborative consumption” are being developed within communities and on the Web to help people share goods and services more easily.
Did you know …
- Many of the stuffs we own sit unused for most of the years. For example, the average American uses his or her car only 8 percent of the time, while the average power drill is used only 6 to 13 minutes in its lifetime.
- Americans spend $22 billion per year on 2.4 billion square feet of self storage.
- Sharing is a growing trend. Worldwide, some 2.2 million bike-sharing trips are taken each month, while more than 3 million people from 235 countries have “couch-surfed ” through home and apartment sharing.
- The sharing economy is now a $110 billion-plus market, according to expert and advocate Rachel Botsman.
So, Now the question is how to start your own Sharing Economy business ?
“Take the time to look for real problems that need real solutions — problems that can be best solved by communities themselves,” Buczynski advises. “Then provide the infrastructure so they can.”
Here are some factors to consider.
1. Start with supply.
“You need to get the supply infrastructure in place before you can push the demand side, and make sure the market is in equilibrium,” Viggiano says. Her company targets prospective suppliers (known as “Taskers”) through Facebook and Google advertising focused on the company’s core demographic and ZIP codes.
2. Conduct extensive screening and training.
As inclusive and socially positive as the sharing-economy ideology may seem, not everyone who applies will be a good fit for your business. Even though they’re not your employees, your providers are the face of your business, so it’s crucial to train them accordingly.
3.Foster trust.
It can be difficult to build trust with customers via an online platform. Positive online reviews and ratings are also crucial for gaining consumer trust and generating leads. Indeed, the transparency is everything in the peer-to-peer world. It’s also key to generate trust on the supply side. Unforeseeable factors combined with the remote nature of peer-to-peer businesses make extensive commercial insurance a must, insiders agree.
4. Keep payments simple.
Nothing makes Doody cringe quite like dealing with paperwork and cash. In addition to being a crucial part of Bellhops’ mission of reducing the cost and pain of small-scale moving, he contends that a hassle-free payment process is critical to the success of any sharing-economy operation.
“It’s all about automation, so you’re going to want to streamline it as much as possible,” Doody says, noting that Bellhops does not accept cash. “If we were to take cash, how would we handle that cash, and how would we get it back to the company? All of that paperwork can be mitigated through technology today.”
5. Focus on brand-building.
By nature, a successful peer-to-peer service has a built-in community of people who are engaging with and talking about it. Smart entrepreneurs will harness this momentum to develop a more robust brand, enhanced by the availability of compelling content.
Just define your useful potential resources and share them to join The Emerging Markets in “Sharing Economy”
