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Unlike the traditional economy, the gig economy doesn’t rely on CVs or letters of recommendation. You build your reputation on one platform at a time — and your reputation is often the route to higher earnings (A service user is more likely to choose someone with 100 five-star ratings than just one or two). Platforms don’t want people to leave, so they don’t let workers have ownership over their own ratings. Leaving a service means starting over.

More recently, we’ve been exploring the “how” of ratings portability: what technology, data, user experience and investment might be needed to make this real.Our design team, along with our policy intern and developer James Darling, have been conducting user research and prototyping possible technical solutions for ratings portability. Here’s where we’ve got to so far.

“Cab” drivers didn’t have visible habits around their ratings, weren’t checking them frequently and when we spoke about them, they told us that this wasn’t something they’d considered before or something they were particularly concerned about. They were confident in their skills and ability to find work outside of their platforms, and viewed ratings more as performance indicators for their platform owners — the main fear being a drop below 3.5 stars, where they might be dropped from the platform completely.

Il faut ainsi, pour chaque startup, intégrer dans ses frais la logistique (les livreurs), le service client, mais également les frais liés aux “dispatcheurs” chargés de répartir les livreurs selon les commandes, au recrutement de livreurs, au matériel, etc. Des coûts qui, mis bout à bout, dépassent de loin les gains réalisés par la startup.

Résultat : une marge contributive négative très importante, si importante que même en envisageant des économies à l’échelle, le temps, la diminution de l’intensité concurrentielle, ceux-ci semblent voués à l’échec, en tout cas sans investisseurs pour les appuyer.

Shyp involves multiple layers of complexity—once it picks up an item, it takes it to a warehouse, packs it up, then hands it off to a major courier such as UPS for delivery—but it's the couriers who define the face-to-face experience for customers. "Our service has so many touch points—showing up at your home and shipping anything anywhere in the world," says CEO and cofounder Kevin Gibbon. "It could be really expensive, like a painting or something like that. We felt that given how complicated the actual job is, the best course is to transition these folks."

Still, by moving away from the contractor model, the company gains the ability to exert more control over the Shyp experience without fear of legal repercussions. It can get more involved in training and coaching couriers, managing the hours they work, and generally treating them like full-blown team members rather than freelancers. It will also begin to pay workers' compensation, unemployment, and Social Security taxes for couriers. They'll continue to use their own vehicles, but Shyp will cover costs such as fuel.

Aren't employees more expensive than contractors? Sure, which is one big reason why on-demand startups have shied away from hiring them. But Gibbon says that Shyp's satellite drivers and warehouse workers are already employees, so hiring couriers isn't a dramatic departure. And its profit margins are such that there's room for the extra cost. "We felt that with everything we can bring operationally, it'll be a net positive," he told me. "If someone has a better experience, they're much more likely to tell someone else about it."