Summary on “Uber: The New Face of E-Commerce”

Uber is an e-commerce platform following the customer to customer (C2C) business model,
where one customer can easily interact with another customer. Here in C2C model both the
parties i.e. customers gets benefited. Uber is an online taxi and cab booking platform which
connects the driver and rider through a mobile app where riders can make digital payment,
book taxi through app and even rate their ride. Uber is an on demand service e-commerce,
where a customer can request private drivers and uber taxi arrives in no time. Uber has taken
over the traditional taxi service (B2C) because it is a safe service, less expensive, superior,
fast and convenient. Uber also provides services such as UberX, UberBlack, UberPool,
UberEats, UberRush, and UberCargo.

Uber is an on demand service business model so it offers compelling value proposition to

both driver and customer. It has no fixed time of work; the driver can work when they want
to. It is better than traditional taxi because you don’t have to go looking out for taxi, also it is
40%-50% less expensive and you can rate the drivers too. Uber is a win-win situation
because uber has standout and has many competitions and the ultimate goal of any business is
to create monopoly also only few can win in a market who offers 50% reduction in price.
Despite this, it is also called a loss making organization. It is in loss because of China and
India, the profits from developed countries such as America is used in the development of
uber in India/China for hiring new drivers and adding bonus. Uber cannot be called a peer to
peer e-commerce. A peer to peer e-commerce is a situation where the seller receives the exact
amount which the buyer pays, but uber is not a sharing economy since there is a third party
which cuts their income (as commission).

Since uber has over 1 million drivers, it becomes a problem to identity the unproblematic and
problematic driver so uber relies on user feedback via rating system. Likewise, driver too can
rate their customer. Uber doesn’t own taxi and has no maintenance cost so their overall
expenses is very less. It avoids workers compensation, minimum wage requirement, driver
training, health insurance, licensing etc. The driver itself has to bear for insurance,
maintenance, cell service and to use smartphone. The issue related with uber is that it is
dynamic i.e. the rate is changed according to the situation, if the demand is high than price is
also high and vice versa. In high demand situation sometimes the price is 10 times higher
than the traditional taxi. And also in case of rain storm the drivers may not be available.

There are many social conflicts regarding uber too. Uber charges a heavy fee for every
transaction. Uber is taking a lot of percentage from each drivers of uber and they have
millions of driver and millions of drives and for every drive uber takes commission and in
return they give no security, standard minimum wage, no workers compensation etc. Uber
drivers are against it but still uber is doing nothing about it. Uber has also been accused of
violating public transportation laws and regulation. There is a lot of resistance from
government side too. In London they passed a law that uber driver must have some kind of
insurance; they have to pass written test and can only register as uber driver. In France too,
uber was filed 800,000 euro to two uber executives for violating rules. In responds to all the
conflict uber said it is not a transportation service rather is digital platform for providing
service. Uber is trying to convince all these parliaments and even government bodies that it is
a different kind of society that is coming up because of digital platform; it is just changing the
way society is working right now.

In the conclusion, Critics says it is a good platform for the rider but on the other hand drivers
are getting low paid. But uber claims that it is not a transportation company and is doing good
job in utilizing spare human resource and financial resource and also lowering the cost.