Friday, March 29

Inside Story: How Companies like CarWale, CarDekho generates Revenue?

Earlier it was simple, a person had a shop, he made money by selling its product or services. Now the process has changed, we are in a phase, where everything is online. Every brand and service has a website through which they contact their clients and carry out processes.

In such quest, it becomes difficult to think that how a website generates revenue, if we talk about a non e-commerce website.

If you want to start an online website that doesn’t involve buying and selling of goods but have an alternate service to offer, you must have thought,

“How do websites like Quikr, JustDial, Carwale, Cardekho and others that offer knowledge and services make money?”

You must have googled it but were unable to find a dependable authority. So, in order to enlighten everyone we contacted a reliable source that would inform us about how few of such websites make money, on the terms to stay anonymous they told us all that was possible.

Generally, everyone thinks, which is, in fact, true that companies like CarWale, CarDekho who helps people buy a right car at a right price, earn by the commission they get through helping a dealer sell their product. Not only this, generating revenue through advertisements is also a common practice.

But a per our sources that in addition to the above, they have pretty hefty earnings that they generate through unknown but obvious services.

One of such method includes “lead per month”. Such websites get almost 10 million visits per month from which almost half of them file a query. Now, the company would not send these leads to the dealers on their own. They must have been following some policy.

That automobile company charges a fixed amount per lead from the dealers. For example, I am dealer A and I want 50 leads per month from CarWale and they charge Rs 1000 per lead, that means Dealer A pays Rs 50000 to the company per month for the services.

To be more specific, let’s talk about all the other dealerships in a city making use of this service. Let’s say 20 dealerships, calculating the per month income from such service, the company makes 10 lakh alone from one city.

Taking into consideration that the named websites work across 20+ cities in India, you can calculate for yourself the total figure.

Not only this, another service that adds to the revenue is the Premium ads charges. Apart from ads that are shown on the websites, there are some ads that are charged more than the former. Because such ads pop up with a keyword, thus targeting a certain audience.

Apart from this, some of such platforms also run an e-commerce portal that sells a variety of car accessories. CarDekho runs such type of e-store under its sub-domain named CarDekho Accessories.

 

To conclude these are the direct and indirect ways of the sources of Income of such companies-

Direct Sources

  • Commission per sale
  • Usual Advertisements

Indirect Sources

  • Leads per Month
  • Premium Ads Charges
  • E- Commerce Stores

Although the sources reported that it is not necessary that they always make use of such services, as they have their own ways like IVR systems to reach out to the clients.

So, the services offered by any such website is subject to need and cannot be considered as regular income.

Now you know that how such websites make money apart from their usual earnings, although one must always note that profits and losses come hand in hand. If a company is making crores in a month, they might as well incur losses.