Revenue Leakage: The Silent Killer of Marketplace Sales

When platforms and marketplaces think about growth, the conversation usually centers around acquisition, more users, more leads, more traffic. Growth teams obsess over top-of-funnel metrics, optimising sign-up flows, and increasing daily active users. But what if the real threat to your bottom line isn’t about getting users in the door, it's about losing revenue from the ones you’ve worked hard to acquire?

This is where revenue leakage becomes a silent killer and does its damage.

Unlike churn or drop-off, revenue leakage doesn’t always show up clearly in your sales pipeline software. It hides in the handoffs, between leads and conversion, between messaging and transaction. It creeps in when users bypass your systems, when payment links get ignored, or when conversations shift to WhatsApp or SMS and your platform loses visibility. Over time, these small leaks silently chip away at your sales, erode your margins, and stall your growth.

Thus if your customer engagement platform isn’t built to keep users inside your ecosystem, across every sales pipeline stage, from discovery to transaction, then you’re likely bleeding revenue in places you haven’t even measured.

What is revenue leakage? 

Revenue leakage is the unintentional loss of potential revenue due to gaps or inefficiencies in your processes. It can come from failed billing systems, misaligned pricing, discounts that weren’t meant to apply. But in marketplaces, it often shows up when users move conversations off-platform - a phenomenon known as disintermediation. 

Picture a buyer and seller connecting through your platform. They chat, negotiate, and then... they switch to WhatsApp or SMS. Not only have you lost visibility, you can’t track the interaction, enforce terms, or capture the transaction.

That's not just a missed sale. That’s your business being bypassed.

What causes revenue leakage in marketplaces? 

1. Conversations shift off-platform

In marketplaces, communication is often the bridge between discovery and transaction. But the moment customers and providers swap phone numbers or connect over external chat apps like WhatsApp or Instagram DMs, your platform loses visibility. Whether it’s a buyer finalising a deal or a cleaner confirming a job, these off-platform conversations can quickly turn into off-platform transactions. Without secure messaging and safeguarding software, this limits the protection for your marketplace and revenue.

2. Gaps in the sales pipeline

Most marketplaces track the start and end of a transaction, but lose sight of what happens in between. This middle zone, where users ask questions, negotiate rates, or reschedule, is where many deals fall apart. Without an efficient sales pipeline tool, you can’t identify bottlenecks, follow up with nudges, or help users complete the journey. Every unmonitored chat becomes a potential leak in your sales pipeline software, where conversions could disappear silently.

3. Poor customer engagement infrastructure

When users can’t communicate easily within your product, it creates friction. A modern chat app for business, should enable fast, contextual, secure communication, while helping you keep the transaction on-platform. If your customer notifications don’t reach users in the right channel, you risk losing them altogether.

After all, your customer engagement platform is the glue that holds your ecosystem and revenue, together. 

How can revenue leakage be prevented in marketplaces? 

For marketplaces, preventing revenue leakage starts with one simple principle: never lose sight of your users’ conversations.

When you build visibility into your sales pipeline stages and embed engagement tools into your core experience, you can stop revenue from slipping through the cracks. Here's how:

1. Regain control of user conversations

One of the most common causes of revenue leakage is disintermediation, when users take their conversations (and eventually, their transactions) off your platform. A buyer finds a service provider, they start chatting, and before you know it, they’ve moved to WhatsApp or Telegram. Suddenly, the platform is out of the loop, and out of the revenue.

Preventing this doesn’t mean blocking users from using familiar messaging channels. Instead, it’s about meeting them where they are, while putting safeguards in place. Features like number masking and secure messaging allow you to support cross-platform messaging without losing visibility or control. This keeps interactions safe, traceable, and within the bounds of your platform’s ecosystem, so you can reduce leakage without compromising on user experience.

2. Add visibility across all sales pipeline stages

From the first message to final payment, you need insight into the entire user journey and where each deal stands. Many platforms lose visibility in the middle stages, where users are negotiating, clarifying terms, or making decisions. If you can’t see when a buyer ghosts a seller, or when a tutor drops off mid-negotiation, you can’t step in, or learn from it.

The solution is to build a unified customer engagement platform that lets you track conversation threads across all channels. This visibility helps identify drop-offs, intervene in real time, and gather insights to optimise each sales pipeline stage.

3. Make communication action-oriented

Messaging alone doesn’t close deals, actions do. Yet many marketplaces treat chat as a passive communication tool, separate from the real transaction flow, which is a missed opportunity. If users have to leave the conversation to book a service, make a payment, or confirm a detail, you introduce friction at a critical moment and thus conversion drops.

To prevent this, marketplaces need to transform chat from a static inbox into an interactive, transactional layer. That means embedding actionable workflows into your in-app messaging, like scheduling, bidding, payments, document sharing, or support requests. 

4. Use push notifications and message previews

One of the biggest causes of revenue leakage? Missed messages. A buyer forgets to follow up, a service provider doesn’t see a booking request or a tutor never replies to a reschedule. It’s not that users don’t care, it’s that life happens, notifications get buried, and platform alerts often go ignored.

That’s why push notifications with message previews are critical. Unlike generic notifications or email reminders, a message preview gives users immediate context. They can glance at their lock screen or chat app and instantly know when something needs their immediate attention, whether it’s a new offer, a question, or a booking confirmation.

This immediacy helps recover conversations that might otherwise go cold. Even more powerful is when these notifications reach users where they already are, like WhatsApp, Telegram, or SMS. By pushing web-based chats into these familiar environments, you increase the chances that users see and respond in real time, without needing to log in or open your app.

How Eldercare platforms risk losing revenue  

In high-trust, high-value marketplaces, like eldercare platforms that match families with carers, communication isn’t just a channel, it’s the product. One conversation can determine the safety, comfort, and emotional trust of an entire household. But ironically, this emotional sensitivity is also what makes these platforms most vulnerable to revenue leakage.

After an initial match, families and carers often drop off the platform’s native chat in favour of private apps like WhatsApp. On the surface, this seems like a natural user preference, more convenient, more familiar, more personal. But under the hood, it introduces a chain reaction of risks:

• Bypassed transactions: Once users exchange phone numbers, it’s easy for them to coordinate directly, cutting the platform out of the transaction loop.

• Loss of visibility and support control: If a carer cancels at the last minute or a family has a concern, the platform has no way to intervene, resolve disputes, or ensure care standards.

• Missed revenue: Renewals, upsells, or follow-on services never reach users who’ve gone off-platform.

• Privacy and compliance issues: Platforms lose control of sensitive data being shared in unsupervised environments, creating regulatory and reputational risk.
  
  

In eldercare, where trust is fragile and stakes are high, drop-off isn’t just a UX issue, it’s a revenue and risk issue. Preventing platform leakage with privacy-first, unified messaging is the first step to protecting both your business and your users.

The key isn’t to force users to stay in an inconvenient system. It’s to meet them where they are, without losing platform-level control. 

This is what Jely is built for. 

Jely provides marketplaces the tools to unlock the full value of their conversations. By turning chat into a structured data layer, platforms can conduct user behaviour analysis,  identify intent, spot drop-off moments, and surface opportunities to upsell customers.

Beyond visibility, Jely also lets you embed the tools that make conversations actionable: bidding systems, CRMs, calendars, payments, and more. All of it lives inside the chat experience, so users can complete key steps without switching apps. It’s not just messaging, it’s messaging that moves the transaction forward.

To support the convenience of buyers, we make it possible to integrate secure messaging with your platform and chat apps like WhatsApp, Telegram, and SMS without losing visibility, safeguards, or monetisation.

TL;DR: Jely helps platforms close the gap between what users want and what platforms need:Trust, convenience, visibility, and ultimately, revenue protection.

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