Do you drive for Uber Eats full-time or even part-time? Were you a full-time rideshare driver before Covid-19 hit and had to switch to Uber Eats to make money?
One of the most popular food delivery platforms in the gig economy is Uber Eats. But some things about it result in couriers developing costly habits.
Here are 4 of the most costly habits to avoid if you deliver with Uber Eats.
Camping Outside Of Restaurants
Drivers who are new to Uber Eats will experience frustration when they camp out close to a restaurant and get no pings to go pick up an order. Meanwhile, they see other drivers go in and out of that same restaurant to pick up. This is a widespread experience. Watching people go in and out while you camp outside a restaurant and get no order will make you wonder how the Uber Eats algorithm work?
Do not camp outside restaurants.
Why? Because Uber does not assign the “closest” driver or courier.
Uber does not believe “closest” means “quickest.” You’re probably scratching your head. Let me explain.
In the old days, Uber would send the ping immediately to the closest active driver on their rideshare platform. This was the First To Request model. Meaning if you’re closest, then you’ll get the job. But they later discovered that this resulted in a longer wait time for other users.
But since then, their engineering has evolved. They have realized that once a request comes in, if the software waits a little bit, there might be another request that comes in, and it could lead to more efficiency to assign the orders differently. This is called the Batched Matching model.
Uber believes this model is better than First To Request because “the result better matches and everyone’s collective wait time is shorter.”
What is being prioritized in the Batched Matching Model? People’s wait time.
If you camp outside a restaurant, the distance to the pickup might be short, but the wait time for you, the courier might be longer at the restaurant because the food would need time to be prepared. Your reward for getting to a restaurant quickly usually has to wait for the food to be ready.
This is a terrible experience for the courier. This is not efficient overall for the platform.
The software is designed to minimize wait time. This means to have a bunch of couriers waiting at a restaurant is not ideal. Put it this way, if Uber operates Uber Eats using the First To Request model, and all couriers camp outside restaurants, then you will have a platform that just always sends the closest courier. They will all sit there waiting at the restaurant for the amount of time it takes to prepare food. This depletes the supply of couriers available for new assignments and increases the wait time for customers of new orders.
So stop camping outside restaurants. It’s a losing strategy.
Not Paying Attention To Changes To The Pay Model
Uber changes their pay model all the time. Generally, people only pay attention to the ones that result in strikes and protests that make the news. But pay models change a lot, especially at the local and regional levels. Pay attention to these changes.
The Uber Eats pay model consists of three things:
- Pickup: A fixed fee for pickup at the restaurant.
- Drop off: A fixed drop-off fee for each drop-off location.
- Distance traveled: A per-mile rate for the total distance you travel from pickup to trip completion. (This is based on the total distance of the route displayed in the app when you tap Navigate.)
Notice, the two of them are fixed. Meaning they do not change from order to order. But this doesn’t mean they don’t change from time to time. So pay attention to the pay model for your market.
If the Pickup fee, Drop off fee, and Distance travel rate does not result in a higher payout than another food delivery platform operating in your market, you should be driving for that other platform instead.
Consuming Generic Uber Eats Advice On YouTube
Some elite drivers make upward of $2,000 a week driving in the gig economy. And some part-time drivers do it as a side hustle. Then, the YouTube content creators want to make money off the referrals and affiliate links.
Who do you think you should listen to when it comes to advise on actual strategy? The elite guys, right? What are they busy doing? They’re making $2,000 a week driving. These guys would rarely go around telling more people to sign up for these food delivery gigs and take away work from them.
Who has the time and incentives to offer advice and tips online? You guess it. Influencers. And their advice is very generic and just plain common sense. I once heard this on YouTube: “Don’t forget your phone; you’ll need it to communicate.” Duh!
Go and find actual drivers in your local markets (not some random person in another state on YouTube) who are still driving and actually making a solid income with the app-based gigs. Pick their brain. Don’t pay attention to these influencers. They are just trying to get you to use their referral code.
And run especially from the ones who tell you to sign up for all the platforms.
As if they have figured out all the platforms. I’ve been driving since 2015, and I’ll tell you this, there is a lot to learn on each platform across the four mainstream driving gigs (rideshare, food delivery, grocery delivery, parcel delivery). And it takes time and putting in the work to understand the nuances of your local markets. No influencer on the web can help you do this at the local level.
Multi-Apping Uber Eats With Other Food Delivery Apps
Speaking of multi-platforms, when you multi-app (we call it ‘stacking’ or ‘stack hacking’), you want to catch as many orders as possible from different platforms to reduce wait time.
There is one major thing to consider than multi-apping—the size of the delivery zones.
You want to stay inside the delivery zone of the apps you’re multi-apping with to get as many orders as possible. So drop-off locations are crucial.
Unlike the Uber driver app for rideshare, which goes well with Lyft for multi-apping rideshare apps, Uber Eats isn’t a good app to multi-app with other food delivery platforms.
Here’s why. Uber started with rideshare and then added food delivery (Uber Eats). By the time they made this move, they had many drivers already signed up on their platform and were operating in many markets. Their starting delivery zone can be quite large.
Other food delivery platforms didn’t have this trajectory. Postmates, DoorDash, Caviar, and other food delivery platforms had to start with a smaller delivery zone. As a result, there’s a huge difference in the size of the delivery zone of Uber Eats compared to other food delivery platforms.
And if you look at the delivery zones in the app for different food delivery platforms, the delivery zone for Uber is gigantic compared to other food delivery platforms.
Thus, Uber Eats is not a good app to use with other food delivery platforms at the same time. The chance of you getting assigned an order from Uber Eats with a drop-off location that will take you outside of the other platforms’ delivery zone is high.
You are better off just going all-in on UberEats, like this guy, who made over $8,000 a month just focusing on Uber Eats.
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Conclusion
When it comes to the gig economy for rideshare, Uber is a household name. But with the Covid-19 pandemic killing the transportation business, many people will be driving Uber Eats.
If you’re a new driver on the Uber Eats platform or a rideshare driver who had to transition over to food delivery because of Covid-19, these are the four habits you need to look out for if you’re delivering with Uber Eats. You’ll start to see you are having a better experience when delivering for Uber Eats. And your earnings will likely be better too.
