Instant Booking
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I’ve been charged for instant booking 3 times more than regular lead fee. Any job was from instant booking was way to small to even make a profit. I’ve searched for an option to cancel this stupid service but nothing so far. If you don’t want us to work with you guys then I will find another company to work with. You’re becoming like home advisor. That is sad
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100% since instant book has started, EVERY SINGLE booking has canceled after learning about my project minimum (aka enough to not lose my shirt). I’m a one woman show, have been here for 2 years and have only 5-star reviews. I can’t even begin to tell you all how incredibly disheartened and physically sick this makes me. @DustiO you asked early on for us to try it and give feedback. I have given lengthy and specific feed back. Worthless. Time wasted. I’ve seen nothing change for me apart from a different initial response area that lets me change the hour block AFTER the customer books. This isn’t even close to enough. At this point, I’m turning it off. I can afford TT’s crap leads for more money. I’ll just use my other platforms more. Hope it was worth it and hope more pros join me and put TT out of business. Honestly, TT y’all should be ashamed.
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Lets gather up people and lets make an app for us. Better than this app who is only taking our money away and leaving us empty handed.
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Great idea, always I thought the same, create somenting fair where all of us get real benefits, a real community. with fair prices, and real leads. im opening to work in it.
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This is absolutely asinine! We can’t have Thumbtack messaging potential customers, making broken promises on the Pro’s behalf to be there within 30 mins of the time The customer chooses. Promising them that they essentially will get a free estimate or bid on the job. Have you lost your mind?! This is not only the most inefficient way of booking appointments, but its also unethical to force this nonsense on the Pros w/o any other option to opt out. We simply cannot disable this without hiding the profile entirely.
If this platform is going to try to strongarm the Pros into literally WORKING FOR THUMBTACK, then we demand benefits and everything else that comes with being a wage earner.
Thumbtack is treading on extremely thin ice right now with this and its not right. By forcing the Pros to work on Thumbtack’s terms, they no longer have the ability to freely function as their own private business entity, communicate directly with Customers or set prices on their own terms(not Thumbtacks), all the benefits of running a privately owned business are gone. And to think that the pros are all now being treated as employees, now being forced into working for Thumbtack, while being CHARGED by thumbtack is unconscionable!
Thumbtack, we will not submit to this disaster, be treated like peasants, or allow for you to continue to steal our hard earned money from our accounts at will. The ship is sinking fast, and those who haven’t jumped ship, will do so soon. Speaking on behalf of Most every Pro that has supported your ascent and has now had enough of putting up with your sheer greed, WE QUIT!..… see you in court!
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Very well said. I deactivated my account, because they were not available to try and reason with. How could they go from being a decent partner to this, so fast?
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I had been with my busisness hide alredy 90 days!
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I agree 100% with @Bigdrive99 - rather than fighting a corporation, take matter in your own hands and focus on your personal website etc.
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@Fix_Fitness You have control over when customers can book you (ie if you need 1 day, 2 days, 7 days lead time before a booking). You currently have it set at 7 days — if you received a booking for 30 minutes out, can you please DM me the name of the customer so I can take a look at it? You also have the ability to set a price for a service call, which you haven't yet set. You can do that here.
@Ashish_Architect @VANiK I always think it's a great idea to have a diversified portfolio of marketing spend, so these are great suggestions.
@Networky Be sure to check what you have your Max Lead Prices set to, to make sure it is set at a price that makes sense for you and your business.
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Yes! I have stopped the auto charge when my funds get low and I will not be renewing. But I would like to use every dollar that is in the account so Thumbtack doesn't just get to "keep it".
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7 days is Not far enough out lead time to work. I can imagine it possibly not being so much of a drag for someone who gets all their leads through TT. But this is not the case for many of us.
Imagine having a full schedule for the next week, which is typical for any business that has employees. You want to be able to give your workers enough notice so they can plan their lives when they’re not on the clock.
For us and every other business in the Fitness industry, this time of the year is always the busiest. It never fails. So why does Thumbtack believe that we should be forced into having the customers who already called and booked appointments directly with us, take a backseat to someone that booked on TT’s instant booking, who we’d never even spoken to? On top of that, we’re turning less profit with these leads at the expense of worsening the schedule 9 times out of 10.
Oh, and I’m not done yet… what ends up happening with these instant booking leads that we had to re-arrange the schedule for, is they end up canceling before the appointment MOST of the time, it seems. So at the end of the day, we are literally charged a steep fee from TT for a lead that netted us a NEGATIVE two service calls and we don’t have enough notice to fill the open time slot. This is beyond frustrating! We shouldn’t HAVE to be forced into re-modeling our business structure to Thumbtack’s liking. It doesn’t work like that.
Thumbtack was advertised as a lead generation platform to connect pros with potential customers. But the truth is TT is just a shameless middle man that reaps the benefit of internet traffic because of Google’s algorithm and nothing more. There is not a single business owner that thinks TT is a benefit to their revenue at this point. Its become a nuisance and the Pro’s only use the platform at this point because they have to in order to rank in the search results.
Imagine if we were to charge all of our customers automatically before we allowed them to actually speak to one of us over the phone? And if they changed their mind, thinking it was too expensive, we refused to give them a refund. Rather a partial credit for their next service call. Could you imagine how that might go???
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I've had my account deactivated for quite some time now. IMO, I would highly recommend that any and all focus on your personal websites, social media, etc... and advertise through Google & FB. At least with those avenues, you can control your target market and budget.
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@VANiK This is exactly what I’m doing at the moment. So I’m actually happy for the push thumbtack had put on all of us to make that change. I would much rather have my 200 reviews and 4.9 star rating on Google instead!
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@William_Villarino - what platform have you found as a better alternative aside from the obvious (angie, houzz, bark)
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@Fix_Fitness that sounds super frustrating, I am sorry. I don't know if this is helpful, but have you tried integrating whatever you use to track your other appointments so that they get automatically blocked on your TT calendar? There are a lot of integrations available - you can see what we currently have here and there is an email address to reach out to there if you don't see the integration you want there. Again, if you've already done this just ignore me, but I want to make sure I am sharing what tools we do have available to make TT work better for you. (And of course you can link your Google calendar as well, if that would help)
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@DustiO i think the main frustration is why do we as business owners need to adjust how we do business to accommodate the needs of Thumbtack? Yes Flex Fitness can integrate and do everything, but even then, the customers that are being sent their way are not quality leads that follow through, and to make adjustments to their business for them seems silly. Main thing we are all asking is the ability to turn a “feature” off if it isn’t working for our business.
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@DustiO There are 18 pages of Pros expressing their frustrations. The changes TT made only benefit TT. We can not be any clearer on this. Many people have asked you, repeatedly, for an official response from TT. While we all have different businesses, we all used TT similarly. It is one part of a marketing plan. It worked great for the Pros, the clients and TT. Now the Pros look like the bad guy if the client doesn't get exactly what they want, based on expectations set by TT. TT still gets paid, we lose money and potential clients. There may be some short term gains for TT, but there is no way its sustainable. I hid my business again, and will continue to do so until TT fails, or someone who actually cares gets control
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Of course all these things were considered. All the decisions we make have to make “business sense”. This just doesn’t make much sense for us to have to integrate everything only to have to adapt to the needs of TT’s platform. Especially when the return we see from TT leads is by far the lowest of everything else. This was a great platform to supplement the vacancies to make schedules more complete. Nice to have when covid hit. But now, its done a complete 180, while taking everything good, that had been working, away from the pros and customers and forcing everyone to use a structure that clearly doesn’t work well. And its hardly fair for anyone either. To be instantly charged for a lead you know nothing about is practically theft in its own right, when its for a job that you don’t want or doesn’t make sense for you. And for many Pro’s, doesn’t work at all. A big problem with instant booking is the fact that the pro is Forced to accept the booking. What happens when a customer cancels the booking right away, even before the pro sees it? The pro logs in to their account and is Forced to accept an instant booking that has already been cancelled! WTH?! No way to repoet or flag the bad lead. And TT is giving no option to contest the bad lead anymore. So I can’t see how this could be considered anything other than theft. Even when TT claims to offer an avenue to get a reimbursement, the process is made very difficult, forcing the pro to write a meaningless description with minimal character count. And even IF TT approves the dispute, there is no refund. Its a partial credit. So where does the money go that was unrightfully taken from the pro??? They never see a dime of it. TT still keeps the money they withdrew from the pro’s account anyway. Its mind boggling how this hasn’t been prosecuted yet.
I can’t imagine how these instant booking changes could possibly benefit TT in any way compared to any of the prior. Sure this gets rid of having to staff employees to give refunds and credits all day long for bad leads, etc… But the problem with the previous method of charging pros was, in fact, the stem of the problem all along. This could all be fixed by simplifying the way leads are charged and charge only the pro that lands the job. This is fair for everyone. And legal, at that. The grey zone that TT likes to continue to dance around in has already been crossed into the red as far as the pros are concerned. These 18 pages couldn’t be ANY clearer of that.
We all understand that TT cares about one thing. Their bottom line. Every change that’s been made over the years exemplifies this to another level each and every time. But this is the story of how many successful businesses end up failing from their own demise… sometimes the people in charge just need to take a step back and check their ego and do the right thing every once in awhile… or they can remain the lonely captain heading for destiny.
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I received the email as well thinking the same (change has finally come) but nope just the same thing we’ve read on all 18 pages of complaints!
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I think they know by now that they'd get roasted alive if they left Youtube comments on.
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You're 100% right. I remember a policy TT had before, where the customer didnt read your quote, you get a refund. guess what, that policy quicky dissapier and instead the started to charge you for any everithing even if the customer didnt read the quote. And after a time the tons of scam leads I started to get only to hit my budget and take me out from the list until i put more money in the budget. and the fact you say, what happen with the money when is debited from your account, why TT dont give you money back? all the stores around USA do it, why TT no?
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Instabook is the worse thing thumbtack has done so far. I was charged almost $70 from thumbtack to swap out a ceiling fan. The going price around here is $150. The other instabooks I have received have been people shopping around or didn’t realize they signed up for a service. I had a guy book a service call to fix a burnt out light bulb a year from now. I call the number and the phone number is disconnected. I contact thumbtack customer service to get a refund and I am told it’s a good lead and no refund will be issued. Guess I will wait 11 months to see. My company has used thumbtack exclusive for years now. We have started using other services and are in the process of removing thumbtack from of business model completely
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