mybuilder

[gheorghe]

As tradesman I’m not happy with Mybuilder website any more, the do tend to red your email between you and the client and charge you for it.
They want you to pay a fee before even having a chance to talk with the client to find out if they are genuine or not, they become abusive.
Use to be different last year was a good site for tradesman and clients in the same time.
They become just another greedy company out there just to make money with out having something to give.
Jus want to know if I’m the only on in this situation?

 

[gheorghe]

they use to nice and helpful but now they just want to charge a fee even for that.

 

[eventdomain]

Good old fashioned service must be re-injected. I think whats happening is these companies are so big, they get controlling, perhaps even one day, owning the advertising sector for all the trades industries.

They can dictate commision fees to tradepeople, control where the users go to seek builders, plumbers etc and maybe end up a mini-Google of sorts.

 

[mickeym]

I think one of the main problems with mybuilder and the hundreds of other 'comparison' websites like it is that the customer isn't aware that they are selling leads to tradespeople.

When the customer gets a phonecall, seemingly out of the blue, they will be annoyed and have had no idea that their information has been sent out to tradesmen.

In addition, there seems to be a lot of timewasters on these type of sites, "oh I was just wanting a price", fake phone numbers and spammy looking email accounts.

Best to stay away from them and work on your own service and advertising quality rather than price in my opinion.

 

[maxine]

I agree that the quality of leads is a bit wooly. Sometimes people will have a trades person in mind but just use these kind of sites to sense check if the amount they have been quoted is in the right range.

Also if they are online searching through directories then they will likely be contacting other sites and trades directly too.



I doubt very much if it will be a mini-google situation as there are still oodles of trades that don't use these sites for a reason

 

[HertsCCTV]

I have been involved with Service Magic, Approved Index, Local Traders all the same some of them even buy leads of each other.

Also find it weird the way that they have a business here in the UK and then one in every country in Europe also.

Forgot to point out - waste of money would not go with anyone of them. If the general user who submitted there details reliased that they were to be called all evening by about 20 trades people they would think again.

 

[Richie N]

I've just used the website to get a tradesman. He told me that the commission has recently changed, it used to be a % of the invoiced amount but now it's just for when you accept invitations. Think that's more or less what he was saying.
He said the new system actually saves him money.
Guess it depends on the level of business you get from it.

 

[Wasim]

How about a new site for local services, which range from photographers, builders, handymen, to personal trainers and other local service professionals.

And guess what, membership is totally free and you only pay a commission if you win a job, i think that would be a great model, wouldn't you

 

[eventdomain]

and you only pay a commission if you win a job

Monitoring the sales would be difficult.

The membership/sign-up fee model is the only way forward. Non payment and declaring payments has to be controlled - forget trust as that goes out the window and you'd be suprised what people will say and do so as to not pay what they owe.

Then there's people taking advantage of the freebie model, which has to be dealt with in some way.

 

[liams7]

id try rated hammer there pretty nice guys.

The guy that owns it tomo is really trying to get it working and isnt worried about money. Obviously there is a cost but there more about the person than the money.

I think its about £10 a month or something.

 

[a1pcconsultants]

I launched a site back in January and the sole reason for building it was to provide tradesmen and customers alike with value for money services rather than squeezing as much out of them as possible.

Our site is called gopherquotes[dot]com. Check it out if you like.

We charge £9.95 a month for tradesmen but we give you 3 months free to trial it out. We dont charge for customer leads or impose comission on jobs you win, you get free text message alerts when jobs are posted and you can do all the usual stuff like upload photos, have a profile page etc.

Hope you like it.