• Tripbaa—Online Sharing Travel Platform

Abstract

The e-commerce platform of Tripbaa is run in the form of sharing economy with the mission to create a match between the travel experts (“Daren”) and the consumers, so that individual tourists from home and abroad are given chance to learn about various tours through this platform, and make such purchases in advance before reaching their destinations. In the initial stage of Tripbaa’s operation in 2015, its business volume and the number of tour participants grow slowly. After making adjustments in the marketing strategies, the year 2016 has seen obvious growth both in the business volume and the number of tour participants. In spite of this relatively fast growth since 2015, the overall profit-making performance is still no good. As a result, Tripbaa needs to think about ways to make better profits after the mentioned adjustments in marketing strategies and growth in the turnover.

We take Tripbaa as an exemplary case, to represent some problems of profit-making difficulties for many sharing economy platforms. The revenue of the sharing economy platforms comes primarily from the profit split with the platforms’ service providers, or from the service charge. Therefore the main reason behind the difficulties in making profit of such platform is frequently related to poorly designed profit-sharing mechanism. After an analysis of the current profit-sharing mechanism and relevant calculations, we’ve discussed about the reasonableness of the profit-sharing method between Tripbaa and the “experts” on current conditions. We have also figured out what profit-sharing mechanism we can adopt to have Tripbaa make fast profits and break even for sustainable operation. Through newly designed profit-sharing mechanism, we can provide a choice accepted by both sides, who can mutually enjoy reasonable profits in a win-win situation. For the platform operators, the expected objective to break even can be reached ahead of schedule.

Keywords: Sharing Economy, E-Commerce, Sales Profit-Splitting, Break-Even point