SimplyBids: Landscape Marketplace
Professional Services
Marketplace
CLIENT
Simply Bids
CATEGORY
Professional Services
TIMEFRAME
7 Weeks
SERVICE
Product Strategy
Development
About Project
- Homeowners receive 4 comparable quotes in 48 hours, replacing two weeks of chasing callbacks.
- 4,700 contractors bidding on the platform.
- Contractor win rate at 31%, against roughly 8% on lead-generation services.
- $41M in project value transacted in year one.
- Quotes are structured and comparable, ending the scope-mismatch problem.
- Built in 7 weeks.
Challenge & Solution
Challenge
Homeowners struggled to compare contractor pricing and availability, while landscaping professionals lacked structured digital channels to compete for projects fairly.
Solution
We built a bidding marketplace that allows homeowners to post landscaping projects and receive contractor proposals, improving pricing transparency and project coordination efficiency.
Getting landscaping quotes is a bad experience for everyone involved. A homeowner calls five contractors, three never call back, and the two who do quote for subtly different work, so the numbers cannot be compared. The homeowner picks based on gut feeling and price, which is how the cheapest bidder with the vaguest scope tends to win.
Contractors were paying for leads that had already been sold to four competitors, quoting into an eight percent win rate, and losing to bids that had quietly excluded half the work. Good contractors were losing to bad ones on a comparison that was not really a comparison.
The client had run a landscaping business and was specific about the fix: make the quotes comparable. If everyone bids against the same defined scope, the homeowner can see what they are choosing and the contractor who does the job properly is not undercut by an omission.
The win rate is what brought contractors in. Going from eight percent to thirty-one changed the economics of bidding, because a contractor is quoting against a defined scope for a homeowner who is genuinely comparing rather than collecting numbers.
The change order flow turned out to matter more than expected. Landscaping projects almost always uncover something once work starts, and handling that in writing has removed the single most common source of dispute.
A guided project brief that captures site dimensions, photos, access constraints, existing conditions and desired outcome, producing a defined scope before any contractor sees it.
Contractors bid against that scope in a structured format with line items for materials, labour and timeline, and any exclusion has to be stated explicitly rather than left out silently.
Bids present side by side with the differences highlighted, so a homeowner sees why one quote is higher rather than only that it is.
Beyond that: licence and insurance verification, portfolio and review history on each contractor, milestone-based payment held in escrow, in-platform change orders for scope that emerges on site, and a job completion sign-off with photo evidence.
Typography & Color
