Ranked up there with the top challenges for any business?
Describing who your company is and what you do.
The challenges around this – namely, context, content, and delivery – really come to a head at events, in discovery meetings, or any time you’re face-to-face with folks who may have seen your website or LinkedIn posts but don’t have a full grasp on your offering.
With all this in mind, we decided to take a stab at it!
In this article, you’ll find:
- What is Ocra?
- Which channels and tech companies does Ocra integrate with?
- Who can benefit from Ocra (& how)?
- How much does Ocra cost?
- Downloadables – handy summary PDFs!
What is Orca Okra Ocra, anyway?
The Ocra team builds and maintains sophisticated integrations and partnerships with demand channels, such as aggregators like SpotHero and ParkWhiz.
Instead of logging into multiple seller consoles every day to manage rates, inventory, blackouts, and reporting, operators and asset owners log into Ocra’s centralized platform for 20 minutes a day.
All in one place, they can view activity for all locations and all channels and make micro-adjustments to rates and inventory that maximize yield of their assets.
Whew. Challenge here, as you can see, is to communicate that:
Ocra = Partnerships + Integrations + Platform + Consultative Expertise
So, what we always try to get across is:
Ocra is the middleware between the operator or asset owner and the consumer demand channels (like aggregators).
We’re always adding more integration partners! Today, these include:
Our rails are really powerful and can create connectivity between a lot of disparate technologies, teaching them how to talk to one another and exchange info in real time.
Creating integrations with these technologies is a really intricate process due to lack of standardization, so our engineering team takes a custom approach to build and maintain these.
We started out as operators who used aggregators to drive consumer demand, and, increasingly, saw a lot of success with those channels.
But operational problems like overselling, messy reporting, and delays in implementing changes to rates and inventory availability because we had to call our account reps started to impact our bottom line.
We built the platform to solve these issues – first, for ourselves, and today, for our partners.
Because, after all…
When it’s easier to manage demand channels, operators and asset owners can scale their programs and open up the funnel, getting their assets in front of even more customers, at optimized rates, to increase online revenue.
Who can benefit from Ocra (and how)?
This is the next big question, right?
Cool, you do this thing, sounds neat – but is it for me?
Do we have the resources and budget to work with Ocra?
Will it make a meaningful impact on my business, or is it just a nice-to-have?
If you’re a parking operator…
You may be using demand channels, such as aggregators, to market & sell parking to customers.
In this case, you may be running into issues like:
- Not have someone in house who can check the channels all day and make adjustments based on activity across your portfolio (demand, occupancy, etc.) to maximize revenue
- See some channels hit a revenue ceiling because they sell out quickly and run out of inventory, while others aren’t moving inventory as quickly, leaving money on the table
- Spend too much time every month manually consolidating reports that look different depending on the channel.
- Want to use starting using these channels, or adding more of them to your tech stack, but are running into operational roadblocks that are preventing you from scaling
| Problem | Solution |
| Overselling inventory | Ocra’s Universal Inventory solution compiles all of your ecommerce inventory into one big bucket, so when a spot sells through one channel, we automatically remove it from the others |
| Lack of in-house expertise | Our team of parking experts (including former operators) can make recommendations for Optimized Product Structures, AKA rate & inventory configurations built to maximize yield based on data. |
| Not enough time/resources to manage channels | Logging into Ocra’s centralized platform takes just 20 minutes day – significantly less time than you spend today logging into multiple seller consoles to manage rates/inventory |
| Disjointed reporting that needs to be manually consolidated | The channels don’t all speak the same language: fields are different, data points have different names, etc. Ocra builds integrations that standardize all of this data into one consolidated report. That’s just one reporting source to view/download every month, which saves you person-power. |
| Impossible to get a real-time view of activity across all channels | Keeping multiple browser tabs open and refreshing them regularly to view transactions and activity for each channel is, well… impossible. One centralized dashboard in Ocra shows you everything at once, in real time. |
| Opaque data around how far ahead of time customers are booking | A proprietary Ocra data point – Advanced Booking Window – shows you how far in advance customers are booking in each channel so you can configure future rates for when transactions occur. |
| Need to contact Account Reps to make changes | Ocra puts the power in your hands to set/manage blackouts and adjust rates and inventory yourself, for every channel. |
| Employees have access/control over to too much or too little | Ocra has the most granular permissioning in the industry, letting you set read & write permissions down the user and location level. |
If you’re an asset owner…
You may be capitalizing on parking assets as an ancillary revenue stream – or not yet!
In this case, you may have opportunities on the table to:
- Remove dependencies on individual companies by opening up multiple revenue streams
- Increase NOI by monetizing your parking assets
- Get up and running fast, with minimal lift on your end and our team handling set-up, onboarding, training, and optimization A-to-Z
- Tapping into parking consumer demand channels so you can position your parking spaces competitively without a massive marketing budget.
| Problem | Solution |
| Not working with parking operators / starting from square one | Parking assets can still be lucrative, even without a parking operator. Use Ocra to sell these parking assets online, even if it’s just a few spaces, to increase NOI. Our team will do 99% of the work. |
| Lack of internal resources | Our team of parking demand channel experts get you up and running with selling parking at the best rates with no effort on your end. |
| Technologies that don’t talk to one another | Ocra has built and constantly maintains integrations with the leading demand channels so that asset owners and managers experience the upside from day one. |
| Don’t want to take a risk investing in something you aren’t sure will pay off | Get started on a per-location basis. We’ll generate traction, analyze the data, and partner with you to optimize pricing, and we’ll review the results together to see what makes sense for next steps. |
| Too much dependency on one or just a few revenue streams | By working with us to open up parking as a new channel, you can remove dependencies on individual companies. |
| No marketing budget to drive demand for parking | Ocra plugs you into the mobile apps and websites that millions of customers use to find, book, and pay for parking. This opens your funnel without you having to spend thousands on marketing, drastically lowering your customer acquisition costs (CAC). |
| Not everyone within the organization needs the same amount of visibility / information | Ocra has the most granular permissioning in the industry, letting you set read & write permissions for individual employees, by user and location. |
If you’re a consumer demand channel…
Your focus may be on winning new accounts and unlocking more inventory from existing ones.
In this case, your situation may look like:
- Salespeople spending time on fielding phone calls from operators and asset owners to make changes to their programs, instead of spending time on drumming up new business
- Hitting revenue ceilings in markets/during periods where/when you could sell more inventory due to the volume of customer demand you’re driving
- Not having the infrastructure to build API integrations with different technologies in the operator’s tech stack that are roadblocks to expansion
| Problem | Solution |
| Selling out too fast / hitting a revenue ceiling | Operators use Ocra to distribute all of their online inventory through multiple consumer demand channels at once. Because there’s no arbitrary inventory cap (giving you 50/100 spaces and another channel the other 50), you don’t get capped after selling 50 – you can sell all 100. |
| Not accessing enough of the operator’s inventory | More inventory = more opportunity. Universal Inventory instantly unlocks 100% of the spaces that operators make available. When you sell a space, we remove it from the Universal Inventory bucket so no other channel can sell it. |
| Too-high supply acquisition costs | Your salespeople can spend less time calling operators to onboard a few more spots and more time reviewing the data and partnering with them to maximize revenue. |
| Lack of internal resources to build integrations | Don’t have the infrastructure to build API integrations with us? That’s okay, we work with you to execute in a flexible way. |
If you’re a parking technology platform…
You may want to expand your functionality with solutions for:
- Universal inventory
- One-click rate management
- Blackout control
- Centralized reporting
Use our APIs to communicate with other companies, instead of building your own from scratch!
The Partner API, which runs on our rails, can facilitate multiple connections between digital parking platforms, consumer demand channels, and more, including surfacing reservation data to customer service platforms like Parker Technology & Umojo.
| Option #1: Embed & White Label | Option #2: Use Ocra’s Rails / Partner API |
| Plug ‘n’ play the entire Ocra platform Limited dev required (we hand you the code, you drop it in) Customized with your brand, so it merges seamlessly with your UI | Pick solutions you want à la carte Design your own user interface All Ocra solutions can be managed using our APIs, so it’s easy to add new functionality to your platform |
How much does Ocra cost?
We have two standard pricing options for our full suite of solutions: a monthly SaaS fee and/or a revenue share model.
The Ocra team works with our partners to find the best pricing model for their unique portfolio. It is important to us that we build win-win partnerships where we are driving significant net value on a per asset and portfolio basis.
You can also opt to use solutions à la carte – just using centralized reporting or rate management, for example – in which case our pricing is modified accordingly.
Downloadables
Snag any of these PDF overviews to learn more about our platform + partners:
- Ocra for Parking Operators [PDF]
- Ocra for Asset Owners [PDF]
- Ocra for Consumer Demand Channels [PDF]
- Ocra for Technology Companies [PDF]
Questions? Want to learn more?
Any day of the week, we’re ready to chat! Contact us at info@getocra.com.
