The Absurdity of High Commissions: Why Marketplaces Need to Move Beyond the Transaction Fee
Remember when ordering a taxi meant calling a dispatcher?
A real person would pick up the phone, ask where you were, find an available driver, pass the request along, and sometimes even help resolve a disagreement between the driver and the passenger.
Today, almost all of that work is done by software. An algorithm finds the nearest car, calculates the route and price, processes the payment, and handles millions of requests at a scale no human dispatch operation could ever reach.
That was one of the promises of digitization: take an expensive manual process and make it cheaper, faster, and infinitely more scalable.
And yet something rather absurd happened along the way. The operational side of intermediation became increasingly automated, while the digital intermediary’s share of the transaction remained remarkably high.
Bolt, for example, officially states that in Germany its commission for private-hire companies is 25% in most active cities,...
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