Things Every Food Delivery Driver Should Know Before Taking Their First Delivery

Tips & Tricks to Maximize Profit and Lower Anxiety on that First Delivery

Money Management

Don’t accept every order ‘just because.’ Take that which is profitable for you. DoorDash(DD), as an example, pays a base rate of $2.25 (in nearly every market). If the customer doesn’t tip in-app, that’s generally what DD will offer you and these are never profitable.

Your time has value and your vehicle costs money to operate. To ensure profitability, you must first decide what your time is worth. Are you wanting to earn at least $15/hr? $20/hr? Decide what you’re worth, then add in the cost of operating your vehicle. Once you decide your value, you should set minimums for yourself. Stick to those minimums. You should have both a minimum dollar amount, and a minimum $/mile amount.

Taking the above a step further, let’s break down your cost: it costs $0.32 — $0.63 cents per mile(cpm) to operate your vehicle. The actual per-mile cost depends on your vehicle, its age, mileage, etc. If you are driving a clunker you don’t care about and will replace with another clunker, that cpm is much lower than if you were driving a nice car that you want to either sell later or keep for a long time. That cpm includes gas, insurance, tires, oil changes, maintenance, and the higher end of that includes your vehicle’s depreciation.

A good way to ensure you are earning at least the value you’ve placed on your time (after expenses), you should assume each delivery will take you 20–25 minutes to complete. Some will be 15, others may be 40(+) minutes. An example is that if the average delivery is 20 minutes, you can take only 3 of them in one hour. If your minimum was set to $6, you would make $18 per hour, BEFORE expenses. Your expense would depend on how many miles you’ve driven for that day.

Pro tip: Reset your trip meter each day and compare your miles to how much total you’ve earned as you go through your day. Doing this will allow you to make small adjustments to your minimums.

Write down your odometer mileage at the beginning and end of your day — keep this in case you make over $600 in one year, at which time you will be required to file business taxes and you’ll want to use this mileage to claim mileage expense to lower your tax liability.

Time Management

Make mental — or actual — notes of the restaurants in your market: are they fast? Are they slow? Do they always get an order wrong? Remembering this is important because you can apply different ‘minimum’ dollar amounts for different restaurants based on how long they take or what kind of a pain they are to you.

Don’t let your completion rating drop below 85% (completion rating is when you accept an order, then unassign it for whatever reason). Completion rating below 80% will result in deactivation from DoorDash — sometimes it happens at the day’s end.

Don’t be afraid to unassign an order, but use it strategically, and NEVER if your completion rating is already too low — DD will show you what it will drop to before you confirm the drop.

Accuracy & Customer Service

Count your boxes at the restaurant and use common sense to determine if it’s missing something. If you see 3 entrees and 1 side, and you see three boxes, you may want to ask “is the side in the box?” and they’ll usually tell you if it was or not, but normally add-on sides will have a cup/bowl of their own.

If you see 3 entrees on the order, and only 2 boxes — there’s a good chance the restaurant left something off — ask them to check it (but don’t go opening boxes to see what’s inside — let the restaurant do that). Use common sense here (does this LOOK like 5 entrees and 4 sides?). Don’t forget straws and/or plasticware and make sure if there are fries that you get ketchup.

If there is a delay, send the customer a short, succint message and let them know. Example being that the restaurant says they just put the order in and it’ll be 15 minutes — send your customer a text. This will help boost your customer rating. ETA texts are generally appreciated by the customer, even though they can see one in their app.

Pro tip: Save template text messages in your keyboard’s clipboard manager that you can use to quickly send to the customer w/o having to type them anew each time.

Street Tips

Watch out for “pl” vs “st”. If you can’t find a number on the house or the mailbox, ring the customer and don’t “assume” that you’re at the right place, unless, there are house numbers on the house before and after that one and the number between them would be the number for that house. Generally, house numbers increment or decrement by 2s with evens on one side, odds on the other. Some start at 00 (23rd street may start at 2300 or 2301).

Some streets increase/decrease by 4, sometimes (rarer and more in the country-side), by 6 or even 12. Once you figure out the increments for that street, you can generally count down and figure out which house number is correct. (Note: some streets have varying increments and decrements — it may start increasing by 2 but then jump to 4, etc)

Streets that curve will sometimes change the street name/number, then change back if they curve back — can be confusing but G-maps (or Waze) is pretty good with those things.

ALWAYS CHECK THE ADDRESS vs what your map says because some addresses will show up in your GPS as “here” when the street junction shown by the actual address could be all the way on the other side of town. Don’t learn the hard way by just following GPS — take the couple extra seconds to ensure the address & map line up. This can save you a lot of time and a frustrated customer.

Lastly, don’t be afraid to call or text your customer if you have issues finding their house or questions about replacement items (if the restaurant is out).