An e-scooter sharing business is proliferating like never before. All major cities are adopting the affordable, scalable, efficient, and clean solution of urban mobility. Commuters and the government comprehend the urgency to reduce air pollution which comes from the car. Hence, governments are being more friendly with the e-scooter sharing companies and providing them the legal room to operate the business of e-scooter sharing with more freedom. Governments are offering them the operating land to utilize it for developing the business infrastructure which includes the parking spots, docks, and charging stations. However, creating an efficient and profitable e-scooter sharing business infrastructure is an uphill battle. You as a business owner of e-scooter sharing business have to consider a lot of factors while deciding the station location, station size, its type and design, IT systems, payment mechanism, and, of course, e-scooters.

In this blog, we will discuss how you should plan and design the infrastructure of the e-scooter rental business in such a way that it justifies your purpose of running an e-scooter rental business. We will also confer how Coruscate Solutions help you in e- scooter app development and even in the planning and designing phase of the e-scooter sharing business.

Things to keep in mind to start your own e scooter rental business

We have divided some studies of this blog into two parts, dock-less e-scooter business model and docked e-scooter business model as some people still prefer to run an e-scooter sharing business based on the docked e-scooter business model to reduce the redistribution cost and human resources.

1) Station location

To have high turnover and high usage, spend more time to decide the location of the stations. You should install or construct the stations only after the brief study of the locality and the pre-built public transportation system. By doing so, you will be able to generate high usage throughout the day. Following is the general guideline for deciding the station location for the docked e-scooter business model.

Install stations at the corner of the streets, so that people coming from multiple directions can get the sight of the e-scooters.

• To ensure the uniform coverage, install stations after every 300 meters.
• Best spots to build the stations are the mass transit spots and the car parking.
• Don’t neglect the suburbs as people living in suburbs prefer e-scooters for the daily commute to the city.
• Avoid installing stations near the train tracks, large gated park, and the factories.
• For the safety concern, don’t build station under the underpasses. Sunny places will be a major advantage if the station is solar powered.
• Always follow the city guideline, do many site visits and understand the users’ behavior.
• Prefer to do a site visit on the e-scooter itself as it helps you to think from the perspective of the user.
• You can use a remote technique like GPS to determine the perfect location for the stations.
• To use the remote technique more efficiently, draw a 1 * 1 KM grid over the map of the coverage area.

While for the dockless e-scooter business model, consider all these guidelines for deciding where your distribution teams should deploy your e-scooters.

2) Station sizing

After deciding the location for the stations, you can go ahead and decide the station size. Size of the stations always depends on the demand which you can determine by using several methods.

• Tourist attractions, parks, stadiums, and busy streets, create higher demand.
• Perform a survey and ask people about their preference.
• Since a lot of journeys are either started or ended from the transit stations, pay more heed to the transit stations.

To make the station sizing process easy, divide the stations into three sizes – large, medium and the small. Once you define the demand, know the size of your station by applying this simple formula,

Station size (Number of docking spaces required at a station) = number of bikes per stations * ratio of docking space per bike

For example, if the ratio of docking space per bike is 1.8 then to accommodate 10 bikes, you need 18 docking spaces.

If you are planning to go for a dockless e-scooter business model, you can utilize these lessons to decide how many e-scooters your redistribution team should deploy at a particular location.

3) Station type

Once you exemplify the station density and the station size, another fundamental decision you have to make is, whether you need to build an automatic station which runs on IT infrastructure or hire a dedicated person who manually checks in or out the e-scooters and takes care of the payment.

Running an e-scooter sharing business with the manual station is not a good choice at all. It is a very inefficient way of handling a fleet of e-scooters. Moreover, it affects productivity and does not avail you to earn more. This is why we always prefer you to build an IT infrastructure to know the live records of the e-scooters, like, the location of the e-scooters, rider details, riding time, battery level and damage level. We also have already built a real-time IT infrastructure which lets users know the available bikes and the available docks at a particular station.

4) Mobile app and payment mechanism

The mobile app is the nervous system of the e-scooter sharing business. It connects stations, e-scooters, users, and admin using IoT technologies. A mobile app lets users register himself, books the e-scooter, pay the fare and return the e-scooters. An admin panel stores the important data which an admin can use to run and manage the e-scooter rental business. Admin can know the live location of the e-scooters, riders’ details, stations’ status, billing data and, maintenance issues. All these features can only become accessible if an e-scooter app development company establish a proper connection between the hardware and the software by using IoT technologies. Coruscate Solutions have delivered so many IoT based projects and earned expertise to perform machine to machine communication using MQTT protocol.

When it comes to the payment, most of the e-scooter sharing companies are using a few popular payment methods like credit cards, apple pay, and Google pays to check e-scooter in or out. The payment module should have two submodules, one for handling payment of casual users and one for handling payment of the subscribers. Since casual users use the e-scooter for a limited time, the payment module should have a dedicated payment mechanism which charges more to casual users than the subscribers or the members.

If you don’t want to follow the legacy and bring some innovation in the payment module of the e-scooter app, we can help you out by enabling users to pay with a smart card. User can check in or out the e-scooter by just tapping the smart card on the station or on the e-scooter. With the simple tap, the user can unlock the e-scooter and start the ride. When he ends the ride and taps the card again, the fare price gets deducted. You can even ask users to keep a minimum balance in the smart card to retrieve the penalty against vandalism more easily. Coruscate Solutions is among the few e-scooter app development companies which provide the IoT integrated smart card payment option in the e-scooter app.

5) E-scooters

E-scooter rental business typically depends on the standardized e-scooters which are specially designed to feed more durability and security. The appearance of the e-scooters also matters as people demand modern and sleek e-scooters. It is also the most important part of business branding and experience. This is why it is always advisable to invest more money and buy secure and durable e-scooters. Omni and the Segway are the two major e-scooter providers available in the global market. If you have less knowledge of the market, leave it to us. We will help you to pick out the perfect fleet of the e-scooters without charging anything. But if you want to purchase the e-scooters by yourself, please make sure, they are equipped with a large battery and low powered sensors.

Following are some extra characteristics your fleet of e-scooters should have in order to not disappoint your users.

• If possible, buy a hight adjustable e-scooters.
• Make sure e-scooters need very less maintenance.
• To deter theft, e-scooters should have extra security features.
• Buy only those e-scooters which satisfy the government’s rules and regulation of the road and safety.
• To provide more convenience to the users, spend on those e-scooters which have the space for storage.

6) Marketing

The e-scooter rental business is the new term for the people. A lot of potential users of your e-scooter rental business may not know about it. To bring them to your revenue stream, running a result-driven marketing campaign is the best option. With a proper marketing campaign, they will know the advent of the most advanced mobility solution. They will also know the advantages of the e-scooters and the working of the e-scooter rental business which eventually helps you to attract more users. To make your marketing campaign more fruitful, divide it into two parts. These are internal marketing and external marketing.

Internal marketing

Internal marketing puts more emphasis on educating staff, city officials and different government departments like the transportation department and the environmental department. Tell them the brighter side of your business and convince them to integrate your e-scooter rental service into the city’s transport framework.

External marketing

The core purpose to do external marketing is to inform the advantages of the e-scooter rental to the public. Let them know the working of the e-scooters rental service and the pricing model. For that, you can use social media and blog to reach different audiences. In order to get positive results from external marketing, don’t just respond to external queries, but define the public narratives. It is also a productive idea to make direct communication with car drivers and make them feel bad for causing air pollution.

We, Coruscate Solutions can assist you throughout these six steps and endow you not only an e-scooter mobile app but whole e-scooter business infrastructure in which every hardware and the software components are interconnected using the six sigma technique to achieve 99.9999967% of the accuracy. Visit our E Scooter app development page to know more about our work process and cost of developing e scooter app. Or, feel free to contact us for a free consultation.