DoorDash: Food Delivery and Advice for New Drivers

Doordash is a Food specific delivery app that provides delivery for restaurants, fast food, bars, and as well as catering services for said places. Couriers are coined "Dashers" who can log in and schedule themselves time slots to queue in for receiving orders to deliver.

Requirements

• Ideally 1 year of driving experience
• Owning a form of transportation (depends on your area) : Car, Motorcycle, Bike
• Smart Phone (Android / iOS )
• Bank account for Weekly Direct Deposits

Suggested Items

• Mileage Book for Tax Reasons
• Device to hold phone while driving
• Car Charger with Charging Cable
• Additional Food Bags (optional when starting)

What do I need?

Most importantly, you'll need a smart phone (I use an S5 Active just fine) and a reliable form of transportation. It doesn't need to be perfect, but at least something that will continuously get to point A to point B without much concern about deprecation of your transportation's value or failure.

If you own some bags that help keep food cold / warm, you'll most likely want to use them after getting set up. Some orders might take more then one bag.

Most orientations try to sell you "cheap" bags that might last you 6 months. If you have something that is better already, I'd suggest you use that instead. They also have shirts, hats, and larger catering bags. If you want something to wear, that is up to you, but I'd personally stay away from any bag they are selling and invest in something more durable.

They also have no issues with you having another person in the car with you while you drive around which is nice. This makes it simpler to find temporary parking spots and have someone watch the car as you do pick ups and drop offs.

Where do I start?
Doordash isn't available in every city, but it is in major cities. You can start the application process to find out at: https://www.doordash.com/dasher/signup/

Once successfully submitted, you'll ideally be asked to come in for an orientation to get familiar with the app, get a background check taken care of, how to add your bank info in the app, as well as get Doordash card to pay for orders that need to be placed in person, like McDonalds or Taco Bell.

Orientation usually takes about an hour to a hour and a half depending on how many people show up. Background checks normally with get processed and done with before you even leave so you can start doing delivering same day, but that might not happen for everyone.

The Pay
Pay goes as such. (This Payout Model will be changing in the coming Month(s) )

• Doordash pays you $1 per delivery
• You make 100% of order tips on top of the Delivery Pay from Doordash
• If you don't receive a tip from the customer in app, Doordash compensates you with an additional amount. This amount depends on your City. For example, Phoenix, Arizona is $5 min payout per order. Others cities might be higher.
• Peak Periods are rare, but mostly happen in either the morning, lunch, or dinner. These are bonuses that usually revolve around accepting all orders during a certain amount of time in a specific area to obtain a "bonus" per order. This bonus could range from $1-$5+ per order.

Conclusion

I've been with Doordash for nearly 4 years now and have gone through 3 different pay models, with a 4th coming around the corner as of this writing. I don't enjoy that they don't train new drivers on how to deal with situations on the road, but only on how to use their delivery app and that is it. However, if you're already experienced with doing food delivery, then I suppose that is alright. Catering orders are impossible to get through Doordash because people just snag up orders without thinking about it.

I used to do Doordash 25+ hours a week, but I usually just stick with the lunch run for 2-3 hours to avoid freeway traffic. Making any form of profit really depends on your area and where you're doing deliveries in. Doing lunch and dinner runs are usually the busiest and the best, as long as their is a time slot available and their isn't a "Bonus per order" going on.

I've tried Uber Eats, Postmates, and Amazon Prime (when they did food delivery), and I have always enjoyed, for the most part, working with Doordash versus the others. That is just me though and you mileage might be different.

Mercari: Selling Easier and Faster via Mercari's Website

In 2018, Mercari updated their website to allow buyers and sellers to purchase and make postings to their selling platform. This update made it possible to make reposting items to Mercari and communication more accessible for the normal user to the more professional business person. If you're new to Mercari, I might suggest a prior article I work up on getting started (via the app), Mercari: Tips for Selling on the Mercari App .


Requirements

• A working computer with mouse
• Excel or other Spreadsheet program (Google & Outlook.com provide such services)
• 2 monitors for easy viewing info to plug into Mercari's Website (Not Required) 

Save your product pictures from your prior listings for re-use.

Dragging picture files before "dropping" onto the Selling Page

Create a folder specifically for Mercari pictures, ideally on the desktop for easy access. If you haven't already saved any pictures, then I suggest you do so from Mercari's website itself by going to the product page and saving each picture for that product. Taking the pictures from the website will give you the already ideal pictures you want to use and will saving you from having to crop pictures or do any further editing again.

Our method of organizing the saved pictures is to name our pictures with the Title of that item that you'll be using on Mercari and adding a 1, 2, 3, 4, and etc to the end. Doing this will automatically sort the pictures out in where ever you have your pictures saved, ideally in that special folder you made for Mercari pictures.

Now the amazing feature (in our opinion) of the Mercari Website for selling is the ability to drag and drop selected pictures straight on the selling page from the folder.
Now because of this, this allows for quick drag and drops for reposting items from your Mercari folder. Just make sure that whatever picture you select first is going to be the main picture, which should already be easy since your pictures are organized with the way their titled as suggested earlier.

Using Excel to store product info for Mercari Listings

Outlook.com allows you to use an Online version of Excel for free. Just make
sure to select the code line for copying and pasting info (Its the "Fx" line)!

Depending on how often you're planning reposting and selling an item, it highly advisable to save your Title Info and Description info in a way to be able to copy and paste instead of having to go back to the sold item and copy and paste from there.

If you plan on selling the same thing many times over like we do, make the description typed in a way that rarely will need to be changed. 

Amazingly, spreadsheet cells can hold a lot more information then just 1 or 2 lines worth of info. In our descriptions, we have at least 3 simple paragraphs of info saved under each item, which is a lot easier then having to retype it all each and every time.

Also, if your not in the mind set of creating new tags for each item, you can save said tags in another row of cells with the three tags. An example of this would be to have the tags written out like so, "Minecraft Xbox LanyardsFireGleam", and if you were to copy and paste these into the tag section as they are, the site will automatically fill in that section with those 3 words as tags. Pretty snazzy! 😁

The Only things needing done Manually every time...

Unfortunately, not everything can be copy and pasted in, such as the category for the product since its a programmed drop down menu, at least for now. There is the automated guessing for what it should be, but half the time it doesn't give the right option. It does try though!

The zip code section might be able to be auto filled in if the settings for your browser are set in place. However, we don't believe that is possible since the coding of the website isn't set to ask for a Zipcode for the browser to understand and fill in. There might be a 3rd party add-on to fix this so its automated, but we haven't found anything to test it yet. Will update if we do. 

Lastly, the pricing should probably be left as a manual entry since it can be quickly filled in with the 10 key pad with a flick of a few fingers and since pricing can always fluctuate, its better to be manually done.

Conclusion

Hopefully this gave you some better idea on the positive use of Mercari's Website versus using the phone (or an app emulator) for constant reposting of items, which is what we used to do quite often at times.

For us, using the process above has increased the speed of doing reposting considerably versus when we were using an App Emulator on the PC to run Mercari as that was slightly faster then using the app on a phone, but not a lot due to the glitches that came with the emulator. Don't get me wrong, we were able to use info from a spreadsheet, but sometimes the copy and pasting would sometimes not stick and not work. The pictures are another story on top of the glitches we encountered. So overall, were pretty happy with the update that Mercari did to their website.

So in the end, if you're someone that has a lot of items, getting the information and pictures saved and set up might be daunting and time consuming. However, having things set up easily to relist in the matter of 20-30 seconds (or less maybe) for each product is worth it, at least time us.

If you have any suggestions or comments about this informational article concerning Mercari, please feel free to drop a comment down below! Thanks for reading!