Direct bookings vs commission: the maths of owning your channel

Marketplaces, agents and aggregators can be a good deal. They put your vehicles in front of people who were never going to find your website, and they charge you for it only when they actually deliver a booking. The problem is not that commission exists. The problem is paying it on the wrong bookings, forever, without ever doing the arithmetic. We run Jimny Rentals and Dream Drives, and this is the sum that decides how much of your own revenue you get to keep. If you have not read the wider picture, start with How rental businesses actually make money in NZ, then come back for the channel maths.

What commission actually costs

Commission is quiet because you never see the money. It is taken out before the payout lands, so it does not feel like a bill the way insurance or a repair does. That is exactly why it goes unexamined.

Do the sum in dollars, not percent. Take a booking worth a few hundred dollars and a commission rate in the mid-teens to low-twenties, and each of those bookings hands over tens of dollars you never touch. Multiply by the bookings you take through that channel in a month, then by twelve, and the annual figure is usually larger than people expect, often more than a good chunk of the tooling or marketing you agonise over. Work it out from your real payouts, because payment fees and add-on charges can sit on top of the headline rate. The number that matters is what you keep after the channel takes its share.

None of that makes commission bad. It makes it a cost you should be able to state precisely, the same way you can state your insurance premium.

When commission is still worth paying

Here is the honest half. A marketplace booking from a customer who would never have found you is close to free money, because the alternative was no booking at all. If a channel reliably brings genuinely new customers at a known cost per booking, and your vehicles would otherwise sit idle, paying the cut can be smart. Idle days cost you the full price of owning the vehicle for nothing, which is the argument in Turnaround economics, so a commissioned booking that fills one can beat an empty slot easily.

So the test is not "commission bad, direct good". The test is what you are paying for. Paying to reach a new customer you could not otherwise reach is buying growth. Paying commission on a customer who would have booked you anyway, or who booked once and should be yours now, is just leaking margin.

The trap: renting back your own customers

The expensive pattern is the repeat. A customer finds you on a marketplace, has a great hire, and comes back next summer, through the same marketplace, and you pay the commission again. You earned that second booking with your service, and you paid a third party for it anyway.

That is the real prize in owning your channel. The first booking can come from anywhere. The second, third and tenth should be direct, because a repeat customer who books you straight costs you almost nothing to win again. Commission is a cost on every single booking. A direct relationship is a cost once, then it compounds.

Moving customers to direct

You do not fix this by pulling out of marketplaces. You fix it by winning the relationship after the first booking, wherever it started. That means a booking channel on your own site that is genuinely easy to use, so there is somewhere for a direct booking to happen. It means a reason to come back and a light touch to remind them, which is the same muscle as recovering the bookings you are already losing in Win back the bookings you are already losing. And it means treating a marketplace customer as someone to keep, not just a transaction to fulfil.

Owning the channel is why we built booking that lives on your own domain rather than only inside someone else's marketplace. The marketplace is a customer-acquisition cost. Your own site is an asset you are not renting.

Run your own number

Pull last month's channel payouts. For each marketplace or agent, write down the booking value and what you actually received, and the gap is your commission in dollars. Multiply out for the year. Then split those bookings into two piles: genuinely new customers, and repeats or people who probably would have found you anyway. The first pile is what you are happily paying for. The second pile is your target, the revenue you could keep by giving those customers a direct path back.

The revenue stack calculator works the layers of revenue on top of the hire, and the same fleet numbers let you see what shifting even a share of repeat bookings to direct is worth over a year. The figures here are illustrative, not a forecast or financial advice. Your real payouts are the ones to run.