Nautal – marketplace platform for boat rentals

Nautal – has been my main job since June 2018. It's a marketplace platform for renting boats, yachts, catamarans etc. We call it "Airbnb for boats".

We have two customer audiences – renters and boat owners. The technical solution consists of a website, admin panel, owner's back-office as well as owner's and client's mobile applications. In order to get boats' real-time availability, we integrate with various boat-management systems (GDS) that boat owners use for managing their fleets.

The boat rental business is highly seasonable. In summer we have a huge amount of low ticket rentals: small boats, day or half-day rentals, the majority of bookings are for tomorrow or just a few days in advance, clients make emotional decisions. In winter the situation is the opposite – people pick big boats, for several days or even weeks, book well in advance, pay big checks, take their time to make rational decisions.

Conversion rate is pretty volatile. Clients' behaviour depends on many factors apart from a season e.g. country or weather. In this situation, it's tricky to make changes and evaluate their outcome. So in order to have a situation under control, we constantly run A/B tests and validate each step.

Marketplace – everything is about the conversion funnel. Visitors come from search engines and paid ads to landing pages with lists of boats, choose one, go to the boat page, make a request and book. So a landing page is the first step of the funnel where a visitor has to find a relevant boat. The next step is a boat page where a visitor decides that this boat is what he wants, then – a request popup that converts visitor to the lead and the last step is the payment page where a visitor books a boat.

What can be simpler than a landing page of a marketplace? Just put the list of boats, give users a search form and filters and voila. Ahaha, if only everything was so simple.

The goal of this page is to help a user find a suitable boat in order to push him toward the conversion funnel. While reaching this goal we have to balance between three things: user experience, SEO optimisation and performance. E.g. adding or removing links can influence SEO page rank, adding photos can influence performance etc.

Another challenge lies in the way we lead a visitor towards the funnel. It's important that they narrow search results with filtering in order to get relevant available boats. Because if they chose from all boats on the landing page they are likely to pick a boat that doesn't fit their needs or simply can't find the right one and leave the website. On the other hand, if a user filters too much – they can get empty search results and leave a website disappointed.

In order to find a balance we run various A/B tests and measuring a conversion rate from landing page to boat page, visit to lead conversion and quality of lead KPI.

The boat page is the next step of the funnel and the most important page of a website. Here a customer makes a decision whether they want to book this exact boat or need to go back to a landing page to see other options.

An important thing is that a significant number of visitors (15-20%) come directly to the boat page from Google. In this case the page works as a top of the funnel.

The most important thing here is to be 100% transparent and clear, give the customer an answer to the question "Does this boat fit my needs?" as fast as possible.

A few changes have been made for this page already – we added clear icons of the boat's main characteristics under a photo, a sticky footer and a header on mobile, cleaned a title section etc. But that's only the beginning.

I have great further plans for this page – show prices transparently, allow customers to book a boat instantly, reduce the number of steps in the booking process, clarify characteristics and options in the boat description, make different versions of the page for different boat types.

All these changes are planned to be made one by one and carefully A/B tested. The goal – to increase visit-to-lead conversion rate and CTR of the "Request an offer" button.

After a renter makes a request, a boat owner sends them an offer so the renter can pay in order to book a boat. The first version of an offer page had a button "Make a payment" that led to an external payment platform page.

Recently we integrated a Stripe payment system and embedded a payment form directly to the offer page. It allowed us to reduce the number of steps in the booking process and clearly communicate to a client that they have to pay in order to book. This move increased a visit-to-sale conversion rate significantly.

Further plans include adding more payment methods in order to give the possibility to pay online to a broader range of clients. Some clients have a trouble paying via credit card because of restrictions of their card providers or country regulations and it's in our interest to give them other easy ways to pay.

Also I want to test different ways to show scarcity and trust elements in order to provide more confidence and increase a conversion rate.

Nautal's home pages (one for each supported language) is made for SEO purposes rather than for users. Only 10% of users land on a homepage. But on the other hand, it has a high page rank and its goal is to share this page rank with the most important landing pages. That's why we have an internal system for managing links that lead from the homepage to other sections.

The owner's back-office allows boat owners to do all their day-to-day work: upload and edit boat fleet, receive requests, send offers to clients, confirm reservations, check booking details and chat with clients.

Our goal is to increase owners' engagement and to push them to fill their profiles and information about boats the best way possible.

How to make a brilliant profile

We are working hard in order to educate owners on how to make their boat pages shine. In addition to an on-boarding course each owner takes, we show them tips on what they can do right away to improve their profiles.

Everything that we recommend affects a boat's positioning on a landing page and therefore the number of bookings an owner gets from our platform, so boat owners are highly motivated to follow instructions.

The first idea was to show a to-do list with all the steps they need to take, but after usability testing we decided to focus on one most important thing at any given time.

The majority of boat owners are simple not-tech people, that's why we try not to overwhelm them with information and show just one action they can do right away and that will bring them more value. After a boat owner performs an action – we show him the next tip.

Clarity of information – bookings section

From the beginning of time, Nautal Owner's back office had one section with requests divided into two tabs – "New requests" and "Confirmed requests" (aka bookings) and an inside page of a request looked the same despite its type.

It caused issues:

First – boat owners needed to make two clicks to reach a list of requests or bookings so it was hard for them to navigate (they are not tech guys at all).

Second – the booking page had a lack of information and there was no way to show it clearly because a booking page used a template of a request page but actually the "booking" entity was much more complex.

So we decided to split a section into two and show requests and bookings separately. For owners who were used to working with the old interface, we made tooltips that explained the new navigation.

A page with details of a booking was made from scratch. It shows generic info about a booking, client's contact details, detailed information about prices, discounts, included extras and a payment schedule.

From this page an owner can open a chat with a client, view the list of all passengers and download an invoice.

Apart from a website and tools for renters and boat owners, we have an Admin panel for inside purposes. We have two teams of managers: "Sales team" who takes care of high ticket bookings and "Owners team", who works with boat owners, educates them and helps to handle bookings as smoothly as possible.

Recently we implemented a new tool in the Admin panel for the "Owners team", so they can see which boat owners have pending requests or not-responded chats and can contact them asap. Each manager has owners assigned to him and sees only his requests.

It was tricky to design this system because we had to take into consideration how boat owners are assigned to managers, and how to manage situations when a manager is on vacation and another guy should take care of his boat owners.

Another question was what delays we should use in order for a request to appear in the system just at the right time – not too early, in order to give a boat owner time to handle it himself and not too late – in order to provide a smooth experience for renters.

So after a few dozens schemes on paper, digital prototypes and days of testing we implemented a pretty flexible and useful system that allows each member of an "Owners team" to keep an eye on nearly 200 boat owners, educate them, react fast if they don't do their job and feel confident that everything is under control.

Requests are grouped by owners, so a manager can call an owner one time and talk through all questions at once. Each request appears in the list just at the time when the action is needed. A manager can dismiss a request in order to not see it again or schedule it for the future so it appears in several hours or days.

Of course, there is a lot more to say about Nautal and my personal impact to the project – from task management, website optimisation and improving, to customer development, flows documentation and iOS App for boat owners. I'll try to describe the most interesting parts in separate posts.