Review of Bidvine
Whenever I can get a moment away from my little girl, I spend some of that time listening to conversations on Twitter, reading and replying to emails. When I listen to conversations, it helps me to identify opportunities to grow either as author, blogger, mom and/or podcaster. That’s what led me to this Review of Bidvine. You see, I stumbled upon a post that the owners of Bidvine were looking for someone to review their website.
As an author, I fully understand the importance of reviews. The main reason I considered the opportunity was that it would help me determine if they were a business I would like to use for myself. I’m all about supporting local businesses.
About Bidvine
Our Story
Getting things done is awesome. More accurately, being done and enjoying the outcome is the real reward of dealing with the smallest fix to the largest project. The problem is that finding someone to help you get there has remained a hassle. Wasn’t technology supposed to help with things like that?
While looking to achieve personal goals, find a language tutor for our kids, renovate our house and even clear a wasp nest from our front door, we were spending more time on legwork than on the things we love. We would rather take our kids to the park than hunt for an electrician that can come next Tuesday. We would rather take our journal to the café than search for a quality Arabic language tutor. This is why we started Bidvine. We wanted a better way to find local service providers who could do what we needed, were available when we needed them, and were interested to help. With a background in marketing and marketplaces, as a team we felt uniquely positioned to tackle this challenge and build a business that could be everyone’s first and best choice for getting from to-do to done as quickly as possible.
We first conceived of this idea in a shared workspace in Dubai, UAE, are building the platform in Waterloo, Canada, are creating the reality of Bidvine and going to market in London, UK – and through it all we are powered by people.
How Bidvine works
According to their website, it simply involves 3 steps:
- You tell them what you need
- They send you bids to choose from
- You hire the professional that best suits your needs
My experience using Bidvine
As I hadn’t used Bidvine before, I had to create a new account. So on their sign up page, I had to choose that I had projects I wanted help with then request a quote. It then asks you straight away to continue with Facebook or Google or sign up with email. I didn’t particularly like this myself. I would have like to see the set up before committing to creating an account. Or at the very least would have like to see a demo of the sign up process.
I used my laptop to access their website and it would have been so much better if it had a drop down menu of the list of services to choose from and possibly a couple of questions . Then at this point they can ask for your personal details to create an account.
After creating an account, I choose to look for cleaners with their service. I felt the amount of questions asked were a bit too much and unnecessary. For instance, they asked about the exact size of the flat. I definitely didn’t know that information. What would have been sufficient was the size of the flat eg studio or 1 bedroom.
Once my request was submitted, I was notified that it could take up to 3 days for me to receive quotes.
The results
After the 3 day period I received only 2 quotes. The quotes I received did not take into consideration the information I provided from the list of questions I was asked. Compared to agencies I used in the past, the quotes weren’t extremely competitive. Obviously that has nothing to do with Bidvine.
Conclusion
As a new company, there is a lot of scope for growth with the set up of their website. But as is, it is functional. I don’t think I saw anything about how their professionals are vetted but I might have simply missed it.
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This is a collaborative post with Bidvine.com but all opinion expressed here are fully my own. If you have used Bidvine before, please do leave a comment with your thoughts below. What do you think of my review of Bidvine? I would also appreciate it if you shared this post with your network.
