Today our team is excited to announce a unique integration with popular long-haul ridesharing app Carpooling, which has officially integrated Uber’s API into their product. Carpooling, a ridesharing app that focuses mainly on long distance trips, allows users to post empty seats that are available in their car and the option to book a ride with someone else. Whether you want to cut travel costs or just get a bit of conversation along the way, the carpooling app puts you in control of organizing your trip. So how exactly does Uber help create a better experience for their riders in the US?
“Our partnership with Uber was an obvious win-win scenario. The concept is simple: turn empty car seats into a mode of transportation. In the US market, where public transportation is limited, there was a missing piece to the puzzle: how does a passenger make it to a carpooling pick-up point, while still keeping the overall cost of the trip low? Answer: Uber. Together Uber and carpooling are excited to deliver the world’s first affordable door-to-door mid to long distance service.”
—Markus Barnikel, CEO at Carpooling
The most convenient way to get to your pickup location
As Markus pointed out, one of the biggest challenges that Carpooling users face is figuring out how to get to their meetup locations. Now with Uber, users can easily get to their meetup location without having to leave their app in order to find an alternative mode of transportation. Carpooling didn’t just throw in the Uber integration. The team customized the integration so that it would be user friendly to new and existing users of Uber, by providing the best user experience no matter where you were coming from. For existing users, Uber will show up immediately on their live map as an option since users would already be familiar with the product. User can also select the type of vehicle that they would like to take including everything from smaller vehicles like uberX to larger vehicles like UberSUV.
So what about new users who are unfamiliar with Uber? Carpooling created a banner for new users, that will prompt them once they login to their app that Uber has been integrated. This will not only improve the user experience for their users, but it will also give new Uber users a free ride (up to $20). All you have to do is click on the Uber button inside the app and you are on your way to claim your free ride. The banner feature is set to release in the next few weeks, but claiming your free ride is all set to go. To learn more about the Uber integration, you can visit Carpooling’s how-it-works page.
Obtaining high ROI for limited work
When deciding on an apps’ next feature integration, the amount of time the team will need to spend on building out the integration is heavily considered. Even then the team will need to consider if the investment that they put into the feature, will create a big enough impact for the time spent on the integration. That’s why the team at Carpooling decided to take advantage of Uber’s API to resolve one of the biggest pain points for their customers. So what did Carpooling think about the Uber API?
“The Uber API integration worked like a charm: first of all, we were delighted to find out that REST and OAuth 2.0 were used, since our mobile clients were already prepared for them. Furthermore, due to the fact that the docs and standards didn’t raise any development barrier, our engineers were able to take the integration from concept to implementation in a record time! Everything went so smoothly and we strongly believe that we’ll quickly add more and more features so that our long-distance travelers can enjoy a seamless experience from using Carpooling and Uber as a whole!”
—Alexandru Radu, Lead Architect at Carpooling
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Posted by Uber Developers
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