What it is like driving for Postmates?
Postmates is one of the largest and well known on-demand food delivery apps. Just like their competitors, Postmates delivers food from restaurants, but occasionally a Postmates driver will receive orders from liquor stores, smoke shops and anything else that you can think of. No matter what a customer wants, as long as it is legal, Postmates will dispatch a driver to pick it up and deliver it.
Signing up with Postmates is easy. After signing up and being approved, you will receive a Postmates credit card in the mail along with a hotbag. I must mention that there is no need to attend an orientation or anything like that. The credit card that you receive will be used sometimes at certain merchants to pay for the food. The hotbag of course is to keep the food hot. By this time you receive this stuff, you should already have the Postmates Fleet app on your phone so that you can begin working whenever you want. Yes, you can sign on and off to work any time you choose. No need to schedule anything!
When you first log in to the Postmates app, you will see "Go Online" near the top right hand corner of your screen. Tap this button and you are officially now on duty. You will know when an offer is being thrown your way when you hear your phone pinging. Pay attention and look at you phone because there is a limited amount of time to accept or deny the order. Analyze the order real quick as you will be shown where the merchant is and where the customer's location is. Once you accept an order, the app will navigate you to the merchant.
Once you arrive at the merchant, if it's a prepaid order, you tell the workers that you are there for so and so order. The name of the customer, and the order number will be shown on your app. Usually, the food is ready and you can be on your way to the customer. Sometimes though, the food is not ready, and you may have to wait a while. Since it was a prepaid order, the wait should not be too long. You were probably just very fast at arriving to the restaurant.The good news is that Postmates drivers are paid wait time. In my market, it is $0.10 a minute. It is not much, but it is better than nothing as most on-demand food delivery apps do not pay you any wait time. If I had to wait 15 minutes, I'm glad to know that I will receive an additional $1.50 for this order.
Not all Postmates orders are prepaid though. Sometimes, you will have to place the order yourself at the restaurant. In these cases, you will place the order and use your Postmates card to pay for the order. These stops usually have you waiting longer since the order was not placed until you arrived. It is not uncommon to wait 20 or 25 minutes sometimes. As mentioned before though, you will get paid wait time. So, if you end up waiting 25 minutes you will get paid an additional $2.50 for the order.
Once you have the food in your possession, it is then time to deliver the food to the customer. I will add here that you will have just earned $1 from Postmates when you picked up the food. Navigation will guide you to the customer's destination, and once you drop off the food with the customer, you will have earned another $1. Other earnings for you were the mileage that it took for you to get from the merchant to the customer. In my market we are talking $0.80 per mile. Once the deliver is made, you will see how much you earned for the delivery. It will add up the $1 for pick up, $1 for drop off, $0.10 per minute of wait time pay and $0.80 per mile driven. The total pay that you receive for any given call will be at minimum $4. Don't get discouraged though, most calls pay much more than that. Many calls pay $10, $15, $20 and even more than that. Each delivery is different. The customer also has the opportunity to leave you a tip on the app after you deliver the food. When they leave a tip, Postmates drivers do not see these earnings until at least the next day. Sometimes, it will take a couple of days.
What is it actually like on the road while delivering food?
Working for an on-demand food app is unlike most regular jobs that people have. There is no supervisor to report to and nobody to really answer to while you are working. You are on your own. For some people that is a good thing and for others it is not. You know the type of person that you are!
Delivering food is not tough physical labor and is a fairly easy thing to do. You will have to get used of placing orders yourself and understanding customer's orders so that you can order the food correctly. Making lots of mistakes can cause you to have bad ratings. If you are ever questioning anything or are confused in any way, you can always call or text the customer. Sometimes the customer will even initiate a text to you for whatever reason while you are on their order. They may just want to pass on some information to you that they forgot about their order or delivery address.
As already mentioned, delivering with Postmates is not a labor intensive job. If you are out there delivering food for lots of hours it can take a toll on you though. Driving around for too long will naturally slow down a person's attentiveness and alertness so if a person is feeling sleepy or drowsy it is always best to stop and take a nap or call it a day. Traffic is something that has to be dealt with while making Postmates deliveries. If you are not patient in traffic, you will probably not do too good with this job. Learning your way around town and getting familiar with back streets will be very beneficial for a Postmate driver. Time is money, and you are going to want to get deliveries done as soon as possible. Sitting in main street traffic is not the way to it if there is an easier alternate route. Sure, GPS is great and really helps, but there are times when you can find a quicker and easier way yourself.
Problems with Postmates
I do not like the way Postmates handles the"Merchant is closed" type order. If the restaurant is closed when you arrive at the destination, you do not get paid anything for your efforts in driving there. That is a big no-no on their part that needs to change.
The biggest gripe that I can think of with Postmates is the lack of Postmates support. Sure, there is a support button on the app, but all that does is give is multiple choices to choose other buttons such as cancel order, contact customer, etc. Hello! Maybe I need to talk to a live person from Postmates. Would this be too much to ask? Unfortunately, if you have a question, you cannot speak live to somebody from Postmates. You are on your own. Even a live chat function is not available. I could understand that maybe Postmates does not want to talk to their drivers, but you guys can at least chat with us can't you? Apparently not!
What is it like driving for Postmates? From a Doordash Driver Prespective
As a Doordash driver, you may be wondering what is the difference between driving for Doordash and Postmates? One of the differences that I noticed right away was the lack of regions with Postmates. As a Postmates driver, you are not assigned to a certain region. This basically means that after picking up an order you can be sent anywhere. Of course, you can see the location of the merchant and the customer before accepting an order, but the distances that you have to travel sometimes to make a delivery will not be a familiar task for a Doordash driver. Dashers are used of delivering the food to customers in their region, and maybe sometimes a bit out of their region, but they are generally not used of traveling 20 miles out to deliver food. Yes, sometimes the Postmates customers are very far away.
The far distance of some Postmates customers should not be discouraging though. As a Postmates driver, you are paid a certain amount per mile. In my market, it is $0.80 per mile. So a delivery that is a 20 mile drive from the merchant to the customer would earn me $16 on a mile drive. Add in the $1 pickup pay and the $1 drop off pay, and we have $18 so far. That's not all though, I am also paid wait time at a rate of $0.10 per minute. Continuing with this example, if I waited at the merchant for 15 minutes I would have another $1.50 earned. So far that is $19.50 earned. That's not it though, within the next couple of days I am likely top see a tip appear for this order. The customer can tip anything they want, but if they had tipped $5 for this order I would have ended this all with an earnings of $24.50 for this one call. Not bad at all!
Unlike Doordash, when Postmates driver receives an order, they do not know how much they will get paid for the order. With Doordash, a dasher sees the guaranteed amount up front. Once the order is completed, the earnings of a Postmates driver are determined. Of course, as mentioned already, Postmates customers have days, or even weeks to tip, and most of them do. So Postmates drivers should always expect tips to come in for most of their orders.
Doordash drivers are used of getting their schedule a week in advance. With Postmates, a driver will never have to worry about that. You can log on and off of Postmates whenever you want. We are talking 24/7 here.
Many Doordash drivers love the daily fast pay that they can use with the app. A dasher has the ability to get paid the same day that they work. Upon transferring their money, their funds can be in their bank account within seconds. Unfortunately, Postmates does not have a feature like this. You will get deposits into your bank account three or four days after completing deliveries. Of course, if you did some Postmates deliveries you would have consistent deposits from them every day.
When an order comes in, Postmates drivers do not have the amount of time that Doordash drivers have to accept or deny an order. With Doordash, you have about a minute or so. With Postmates, you will have about five to 10 seconds. A quick mind will be needed in deciding if you want to accept a Postmates order or not.
The last thing that I would like to add in here is probably the most important thing of all and that is money. When you drive for Postmates, you will quickly notice the different amount of pay that you will earn per call. The reason for this is that you will actually receive all of the tip money that Postmates customers leave you. These Postmates customers will leave you a tip after service is rendered. So if you provide good service to them, they will leave you a generous tip. Believe me when I say generous tip. Many Postmates customers leave tips that are bigger than what you earned from your regular Postmates earnings.
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