Grubhub used to be the household name in food delivery. It had a 70% market share in 2016. In 2018, that was 34%. Meanwhile, Uber Eats and DoorDash were 28% and 18%, respectively. But in 2021, DoorDash is the household name when it comes to food delivery. According to Edison Trends, it commands 45% of the US food delivery market. Early this year, DoorDash became a public company on the New York Stock Exchange, valued at $72 billion.
When it comes to food delivery, DoorDash is a big deal. But not for high pay, though. That title belongs to Caviar, in my opinion, which DoorDash acquired in November 2019. RIP to the best food delivery platform.
How bad can the pay on DoorDash be? Last year, a study claimed that DoorDash drivers make an average of $1.45 an hour. Wowza! No wonder there’s this #DeclineNow Movement going on. So we have to hack the dash if we don’t want to be making slave wages.
How can drivers make more money on the platform in 2021? Here are five pro hacks for DoorDash that work in 2021.
1. Camp The Ghost Kitchens
The Covid-19 pandemic forced the restaurant industry to shut its doors. Over 110,000 eating businesses closed in 2020. According to Business Insider, 17% of US restaurants permanently shut down when Covid arrived at the scene. The result? A bunch of ghost kitchens emerged.
What is a ghost kitchen? It’s a professional facility set up to cook and prepare delivery-only meals. It’s a facility where food is prepared and delivered using third-party apps like DoorDash, Uber Eats, and Grubhub.
By estimate, it should be a $1 trillion business by 2030.
A ghost kitchen aims to receive orders, prepare them, and quickly deliver them by food delivery platforms. If you’re a courier who loves restaurants that gets food out quickly, finding suitable ghost kitchens and camping can be a very profitable strategy.
Currently, there are around 1,500 ghost kitchens in the US. Identify the ghost kitchens in your market, find out the ones that use DoorDash and can crank out orders, map them out, and then camp those suckers. When accepting any order, if the drop-off puts you near a ghost kitchen you know is in hot demand and can crank out orders, it’s probably a good idea to accept.
2. Hunt For The Caviar Orders
Caviar is a premium brand in food delivery acquired by DoorDash in 2019. As of August 2020, the two have merged into one app. All Caviar orders get assigned to DoorDash Dashers and not Caviar Couriers.
Caviar, on average, paid more than DoorDash. Their clients are more affluent, and Caviar partners with restaurants with more expensive menus. Naturally, the order volumes tend to be larger, and therefore a percentage tip will be more significant.
When you accept an order on DoorDash and communicate with the customer, you receive an automated message. This way, you can tell if the order is a Caviar order or a DoorDash.
Another way to discern these is to look for the orange Caviar icon when you look at the order details:
You can cancel the order once you find out if it’s a DoorDash order and wait to see if you can get a Caviar order. But this is a risky long-term strategy because you’ll lower your completion rating and risk deactivation. DoorDash requires a minimum of 80% completion rate.
It doesn’t mean you can’t position yourself to catch more Caviar orders better.
The way to do this is to go to the Caviar website and enter your city. Then see which restaurants pop up in your market. Map them all out. Then, position yourself in an area surrounded by as many Caviar restaurants as possible to increase your chance of a Caviar order.
3. Hunt For DoorDash Orders With Masked Tips
Acceptance Rates do not matter on DoorDash only if you want to be labeled a Top Dasher does Acceptance Rate matter (more on this later).
You’re free to decline orders as much as you like. Most elite drivers who make in the $1200-1500 a week range delivering foods have a low acceptance rate.
It gives you the freedom to decline as many orders as you want until the right one comes. And there is a particular type of DoorDash order that you should chase. They’ll look like this when offered to you:
What does “tip might be higher” mean? Why doesn’t DoorDash show you the total tip? Pretty simple, the platform does not want to create a market dynamic where Dashers only accept orders with high-paying tips. DoorDash’s platform is unique in that you see the tips upfront. On other platforms like Caviar, the tips come after your complete the order. So, they mask the total tip and show you an artificial value for the other. And it’s easy to spot these after a while.
They have a predictable pattern to them. Usually, the ones ending with a number 0 or a number 5 are generally above the average of $7-8 dollars. It means the customer made a decent tip, and DoorDash masked this.
After you complete the order, you’ll see the total tip.
Learn to discern these, and you’ll make more money over time.
4. Do Not Become A Top Dasher on DoorDash
Acceptance Rates do not matter on DoorDash. Only if you want to be named a Top Dasher does Acceptance Rate matter (minimum 70%); that is DoorDash’s program to incentivize Dashers to accept more orders.
To qualify, you have to meet these requirements:
- Customer rating of at least 4.7
- An Acceptance rate of at least 70%
- Completion rate of at least 95%
- 100 completed deliveries during the last month
- At least 200-lifetime deliveries completed
What’s the upside of being a Top Dasher?
According to the official page, there are two benefits:
- “Regardless of whether or not it is busy, as a Top Dasher, you are always welcome to schedule a dash and “Dash Now.”
- “When things are slower, you will be prioritized for new orders.”
Generally speaking, to reap this benefit to the maximum, you would be dashing outside of peak hours (when things are slower). That’s not a gig economy best practice. Long term, this is not going to earn you a lot of money. And in fact, most Dashers complain that being a Top Dasher isn’t all that great.
To meet Top Dasher requirements, or to stay a Top Dasher month to month, you will have to accept many low-paying orders. Long term, this is not going to earn you a lot of money.
What should you do?
Well, don’t be a Top Dasher. Just keep your Acceptance Rate below 70%.
How would this help you?
DoorDash’s current pay model has several parts:
- Base Pay
- Promotions
- Tips
And the Base Pay will range from $2-10 depending on three components:
- Estimated time,
- Distance,
- The desirability of the order
The desirability is most interesting. If a Dasher rejects an order, its desirability goes up. And so the platform bumps the Base Pay and then offers it to the next Dasher, hoping they will accept it. If they don’t, the platform will bump it.
So, suppose you’re not a Top Dasher. In that case, you will get highly undesirable orders. These orders are from other couriers who have ‘first dibs’ on these terrible orders because they are Top Dashers. Let the Top Dashers make a low-paying order more valuable for you.
“One man’s trash is another man’s treasure.”
5. Mastering The Patented Combined Dashs
Okay, I’m going to put this out there. This strategy is challenging. Why? Because to increase your chances of pulling this off would involve doing something most the Dashers hate to do and tend to avoid doing: deliver to apartments, hotels, or campuses.
You’re probably thinking, wait, what? Apartments, hotels, and campuses? That’s stupid. Any seasoned Dasher would avoid these places.
Exactly. But let’s discuss it anyway.
You may or may not know, but DoorDash has a patent on its order combining technology (Patent US10740715B1).
How does this order combining technology work? It allows customers to “share” a Dasher and get a discount for agreeing to share. It’s like Uber Pool for food delivery. The customers do not have to be ordering from the same restaurant. They live near each other and choose to share the Dasher and get a discount on the delivery fee. So the drop-off locations are close to each other, but the merchants’ sites aren’t necessarily close.
The key to this strategy is getting multiple orders completed with drop-offs close to each other due to this patented combined order model. It is optimized when you have the lowest proximity possible for the drop-offs. And the ideal places for this condition? Hotels, apartments, and campuses. Areas that generally house a lot of individuals nearby (the same building).
This strategy depends on highly undesirable orders: orders people reject. Meaning, other Dashers reject an order because the drop-off is to a hotel, apartment, or campus. Hence, the order’s base pay goes up, and then you accept.
You’re trying to hunt for highly undesirable orders with high drop-off proximity.
This strategy is difficult to make part of your long-term strategy because it’s very unpredictable. You cannot predict when two customers living near each other will place an order on DoorDash and agree to share a Dasher. It would mean they are willing to risk delivering cold food. And that’s not likely.
So a lot of things need to go right. There are not many people on YouTube or in forums who have any insight into doing this well yet. No one has formulated a way to increase the odds of receiving these “shared Dasher” orders, mainly because not many Dashers know this patented technology.
But the ideal state of this strategy would mean a Dasher can accept multiple combined orders back to back. It is the holy grail of food delivery: the batch-to-batch chain—essentially boom boom boom.
When you can create this boom boom boom effect, your income will hit that $30-40 an hour mark no problem.
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