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A strategy for maintaining and increasing profits when Delivery apps are slow

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Pandemic Unemployment Assistance (PUA) $300 per week payments ended September 4. People will order less, and more may turn to deliver for apps like Doordash, Uber Eats, Grubhub and others, further saturating the market with drivers.

At the same time, these apps seem to be racing to see who can pay us less. What do we do when it's harder to make a profit? Is it time to hang it up and move on to more profitable things?

We discuss a strategy that might help keep profitability up. Or even increase it.

Multi-apping.

And I don't mean just switching between the three main apps. Start looking at other types of platforms. We look at a few of them:

Lesser known food delivery platforms
Catering platforms
Last mile delivery platforms
On demand package delivery platforms
Shopping platforms.
You can find the dedicated page for this episode here on our website.

What do you think? What delivery platforms do you have in your market? What's your experience with them? I'd love to hear what options are out there, as I want to build a directory, so please email your comments or leave a comment below.

Could this help someone else? Please share it.

Kyler

Sunday 10th of October 2021

Hi this comment is actually for another post that had comments closed. It was talking about how Doordash was hiding tips. The writer said ‘I don't expect them to be incredibly transparent, whatever it is. My guess is they are going to be more like Uber and Postmates, where they will no longer identify the payment amount’. This statement about Postmates is inaccurate. Postmates had a very transparent pay model. Now grated it was shit pay. But at least with Postmates I knew that I’d be making .30 a mile .03 cents for waiting 1.00 for pickup and 1.50 for drop off. Then the client MAY tip 3 days later the next time they open the app.

Thanks for the great info tho. No tip no trip for sure… or at least until Doordash pays enough to make that mantra obsolete.

EntreCourier

Thursday 11th of November 2021

Thanks for your comment! You make a really good point about Postmates and transparency. Before they were swallowed up they were the last major app to be completely transparent in how they calculated the pay. Apologies if the wording in the other article indicated that they weren't transparent. Transparency by Postmates was the one thing I respected most about them.

The reference in the other article had more to do with how Postmates did not offer an amount when presenting a delivery offer. Grubhub tells you the total amount including the tip, Doordash generally gives you an idea what the amount would be. Postmates didn't give that.

Once upon a time, Uber Eats was the same way. Late 2019/early 2020 they finally started displaying a pay amount.

Personally, I never minded that part with Postmates. If you were good at it, you could still figure out whether a delivery would be worthwhile. I think you said it well - you could estimate what the delivery was going to pay. You could also play the averages and get a feel for when an offer would have a good tip. In some ways I kind of liked Postmates better because they didn't provide the up front amount - it weeded out a lot of the competition. There were other issues with Postmates, but at least with them you knew what you were dealing with.

Funny thing was, I was okay with Postmates but for a long time refused to deliver Uber Eats. The deal breaker for me wasn't so much them not displaying pay, but you had no idea where you were going until you picked up the food. You had a better chance of estimating if a PM delivery was worthwhile than you did UE. It was only after Uber Eats started letting you know the general location of where the delivery would drop off that it made sense to deliver for them again.

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About the Author

Ron Walter made the move from business manager at a non-profit to full time gig economy delivery in 2018 to take advantage of the flexibility of self-employment. He applied his thirty years experience managing and owning small businesses to treat his independent contractor role as the business it is.

Realizing his experience could help other drivers, he founded EntreCourier.com to encourage delivery drivers to be the boss of their own gig economy business.

Ron has been quoted in several national outlets including Business Insider, the New York Times, CNN and Market Watch.

You can read more about Ron's story,, background, and why he believes making the switch from a career as a business manager to delivering as an independent contractor was the best decision he could have made.

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