Professional Services Meet eCommerce
The service economy is quickly growing all around us. According to recent estimates, the service economy is expected to reach 3.8 trillion by 2025. At the same time, we’re seeing another shift, which is the movement towards shorter-term and project based service work.
The on-demand model has been fully embraced in certain areas of the economy (Upwork, WorkMarket, Handy, Uber, for starters). However, when it comes to meeting the needs for shorter-term and project based work, professional services firms struggle to meet this demand in a scalable way. I believe that’s because to date, professional services have lacked the infrastructure and tools to drive scalability from shorter-term engagements.
Professional services need an eCommerce function.
Take for example Etsy. Before Etsy, independent business owners had the challenge of setting up a virtual storefront, becoming discoverable and integrating payment functionality. Etsy solved for all of those problems, delivering new audiences, amplification and a plug-and-play experience to make selling online a turnkey experience for creative businesses.
SkillShare did this in education, making it relatively easy for an expert to design, share and earn revenue from an online course. This is a process that used to be manual and time-intensive for experts that were seeking to productize their insight.
And Amazon of course mastered the logistics end, making it easy for any retailer to ship throughout the country and world.
Now it’s time for professional services to catch up. At WorkRails, we are making it easy and scalable to offer and sell professional services. Our embeddable technology allows service providers to define and standardize service catalogs. Our platform powers efficient resource allocation and management. And our back-end capabilities enable real-time collaboration, contract, time and spend management.
The time has come to bring commerce and professional services together. To find out how WorkRails will help your company navigate the service economy, contact us at info@workrails.com.
