Australian funeral bid company competes against Public Firms

If you have followed the death care industry in Australia you would see that large public companies InvoCare and Propel Funeral Partners are seeking to gain market share via acquisitions.  This is nothing new in the funeral industry where unit “roll-ups” have been in vogue since the 1960’s.

If you are a free-market person you are probably very much in line with InvoCare and Propel Funeral Partners as they are taking the risk and trying to reward investors by using their size to lure client families by reputation, and in some cases, price.  If you are more of a social justice person or just a free-market person who worries about domination by big firms eventually knocking smaller competitors out of business, you might want to take a look at the Australian funeral bid company, ezifunerals.

The company has hired public relations firms to tell of the need for a more transparent way of searching for services and costs in the Australian death care industry.  Here is a public relations piece put out in support of ezifunerals.

ezifunerals operates as a web-based technology company by taking a monthly payment from existing funeral homes to be listed on their web-site.  They then advertise for potential funeral and/or cremation families, both at-need and pre-need, to list what they are looking for in a death care service and their location.  ezifunerals then lets their member funeral homes bid for the business.  You can take a look, and see how it works, by looking at their web-site here.

This is an interesting concept and it will be interesting to see if the company can afford enough marketing to get client families to take a look.  In the death care business, customer acquisition costs, when competing against the market leaders is always costly – in most cases it proves almost impossible to pull enough business away from the heritage provider to be profitable.  However, American companies like Newcomer Funeral Homes has proven that it can be done.  Our guess is that ezifunerals has a lot of system proving to do before they will make a big dent in the large public companies.  We will be watching to see how ezifuneral does.

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