It's been six months since Uber he presented Go get it, a global smorgasbord of product and feature reveals that covered everything, from booking party buses and voice ordering for Uber Eats to linking travel plans to Gmail and skipping the lines to eat at sports stadiums.
Product reveals are not just about creating new revenue streams or attracting users, although these are certainly objective. Uber has a broader end goal: to create a closed business cycle in which each product leads customers to other channels of Uber. And that loop is growing.
Buoyed by a strong push in user engagement and geared up for the upcoming holiday season, Uber has released another series of product updates and new features. This time, the products were launched under the marketing banner of Go Get Give. Now the clients of Uber they can do things like book with OpenTable y Viator through the application of Uber, search merchants for the right booze bottle to deliver, and even schedule Uber gift cards to be sent on Christmas Day.
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Uber was founded with a strategy of scaling at all costs. While Uber was struggling to figure out the elusive profitability of ride-sharing, added its food delivery pillar, Uber Eats. Now Uber seems to have taken a page out of the customer loyalty book of Amazon to attract new users and make existing customers spend more money on the platform.
Just like Alexa, the voice assistant of Amazon, generates secondary income for Amazon every time a customer says, "Alexa, buy more shampoo and conditioner," Uber it also increases your travel revenue when a customer books an event through the app Uber with Viator and then book a Uber to take them there.
CEO Uber, Dara Khosrowshahi, referred to this during the company's third-quarter earnings call that took place on November 1.
“We are actively cross-selling from supermarket food delivery consumers, alcohol grocery consumers, and indeed we are now back on the move”Khosrowshahi said. “All of the cross-sells that we have on the platform continue to increase, drive new customers and drive retention as well.”
There is evidence to suggest that, at least in the short term, this work bears fruit. In the third quarter, gross reserves of Uber reached $29.000 billion, an increase of 26% over the previous year. The company's monthly active platform consumers (MAPC) grew by 14% year on year from 109 million quarterly users to 124 million. If gross reserves grew at a faster rate than MAPC, we can infer that each customer is spending more on the platform than they would otherwise have.
“As far as consumers are concerned (high frequency and low frequency consumers), it is absolutely true that if we can move our consumer usage from lower frequency to higher frequency, we will see very significant growth.”Said Khosrowshahi during the third quarter earnings call of Uber.
It is not beyond the realm of possibility that Uber extends beyond the mobility space and into other revenue channels. The company recently launched a new advertising division that monitors in-app ads while traveling. To grow that business, one day we might see Uber hiring creatives and using its vast amounts of passenger data to provide external marketing services for brands. Who knows?
While short-term reports show that the depth of the products of Uber can make customers sticky, the company must be careful to bite off more than they can chew. Uber made gains in revenue in the third quarter, but still lost $1.2 billion, almost half of which can be attributed to operating losses. Tech giants and upstarts alike are in the midst of cutting costs, measures that include cutting jobs, as growth becomes more difficult amid today's economy.
