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Have you ever wondered about how to beat the Uber Eats algorithms to get more home delivery trips on Uber Eats? If this is something you've been wondering about, you wouldn't be alone. However, it's not actually that hard to learn how to get more orders on Uber Eats with the right strategy ' and luckily, our experts are on hand today to help with this. As such, today, we'll be looking at the key question: how do I get more trips with Uber Eats? Hopefully, this might help you earn more from your time as an Uber Eats driver ' and allow you more flexibility with your driving work too.
WHY SHOULD I GET MORE TRIPS WITH UBER EATS?
When it comes to delivery driving, one of the biggest mistakes is accepting downtime. Unfortunately, though, this is a trap that many delivery drivers accidentally fall into, and it can massively impact your earnings (for the worse).
What do we mean here? Well, in this context, downtime is time that you spend 'hanging around' without working on a delivery. This might be waiting for orders to come in, or it could be the time you spend sitting out in the car park waiting for a customer's order to cook.
This might seem like a minor frustration, but it can drastically influence your earning potential! Let's give an example here.
Why Idle Time Slashes Your Hourly Income
Imagine you take on two orders while delivering with Uber Eats; one is worth $10 with a $4 tip, and the other is worth $5 with a $3 tip. These two trips take thirty minutes and twenty-five minutes, respectively. With tips, you would hence then earn $22 in just shy of an hour ' that's a decent hourly rate, especially on Uber Eats. After all, the average Uber Eats income rate is around $15 per hour. However, Uber Eats' revenue has grown annually and was nearly $5 billion in 2020. So, why shouldn't you earn a bonus for your time?
The problem with this calculation is that we haven't accounted for downtime. In the above example, for driving time only, we earned $22 in 55 minutes ' that's $0.40 per minute or $24 per hour. Doesn't sound too bad. However, we also need to consider idle time in this ' the 10 minutes you spend waiting for the first delivery to cook and the eight minutes you sit waiting for the second order to come in. You're technically still working during that time, but you're not getting paid for it. So, you've sat around unpaid for 18 minutes ' taking your total working time from 55 minutes to 73 minutes. Now, suddenly, you're only making around $0.30 per minute, or $18. That's not so great at all.
In short: idle time is the time when you're signed into an app but not actively making a delivery. And unfortunately, idle time is often considered one of the biggest mistakes made by Uber Eats drivers ' it's a huge waste of time and money alike.
Plus, YCombinator warns that waiting around 10 minutes to pick up orders is pretty common for Uber Eats drivers. So, you could face this issue with almost every delivery!
More Trips = More Income
Inevitably, since gig drivers work on a piece rate, taking on more gigs in a single period of time could substantially increase your potential earnings. Taking on more trips during a single delivery run is even more profitable since it reduces the time you have to spend traveling between restaurants.
Let's demonstrate how this works. Assume you had two deliveries; one worth $8 with tips and one worth $4 with tips. They will each be a round trip of 25 and 15 minutes, respectively. If you did these deliveries separately, you'd be driving for around 40 minutes and would make $12 ' that equates to $18 per hour. However, if you combined these trips into a single delivery run and it only took 30 minutes instead of 40 because you haven't wasted time going back and forth, you'd make an hourly rate of $24 per hour instead.
This is pretty obvious in most cases. Plus, increasing the number of trips you do in a day can also increase your earning potential or cut your fuel bills. Both of these factors can be valuable for keeping gig driving profitable. Remember: delivering multiple orders at once is fully supported by Uber Eats, making it worth considering.
HOW TO GET MORE TRIPS WITH UBER EATS?
Since idle time is evidently so damaging to your gig-driving income, it's worth considering how you can get more trips with Uber Eats. Fortunately, there are a couple of options you could consider here. However, not all of these will necessarily be right for your delivery driving; so, if possible, we would recommend considering whether the following methods are right for your driving goals.
#1 Work More Often
Sometimes, the simplest options are the best. If you want to get more trips with Uber Eats, try to be available to work more often. After all, you'll almost certainly get more trips if you're available to complete deliveries for three hours per day than if you were only around for one hour. Plus, it's worth considering that if you're regularly active on Uber Eats, you may find it easier to select those higher-value deliveries as well.
But remember, you can't work unlimited hours with UberEats ' the limit per day is 12 hours. So, try to ensure the hours you work will be worthwhile. It's also worth noting that the average Uber Eats driver usually completes around five to eight deliveries per day.
#2 Enable Auto-Accept
If you've been looking to learn how to get more trips with UberEats, one of the most obvious options ' as recommended by Delivery Crazy ' is simply to enable auto-accept. Auto-accept gives you substantially less control over your deliveries, so it may mean you end up taking on gigs you usually wouldn't take. However, the auto-accept feature is one of the best ways to stop downtime from becoming an issue for your earnings.
As such, we would recommend tracking how much downtime or idle time you usually face. If you think that the lower-income potential from auto-accept is still better than wasting your time sitting idle, auto-accept could be a great tool to use.
#3 Look for Delivery Hotspots
Did you know that certain areas can sometimes be 'delivery hotspots' ' i.e., areas that have a much higher demand for delivery services? This might be because it's a local housing estate. Many more residents want freshly cooked takeaway meals; alternatively, it could be around a particularly popular restaurant or takeaway chain. Whatever the case might be, looking out for and identifying these hotspots can be an excellent way to increase your chances of getting trips. Be in these areas when it matters to increase your chances of getting trips.
Delivery Drive When Out and About
Don't forget ' it's often possible to deliver drive when you're out and about, even if you're not working or if you have guests in the car with you. As such, turning on the Uber Eats app at this point may help you take on deliveries at times when you'd normally be busy. These might be when meeting friends or collecting the kids on the school run! The opportunities are truly numerous!
GETTING MORE TRIPS DOESN'T ALWAYS EQUAL BETTER RATES
It's worth considering that while getting more trips can increase your chances of income, it doesn't guarantee good value-for-money orders. Indeed, in many cases, getting more trips can increase the chances of taking on low-paying orders ' i.e., orders that are unlikely to tip fairly. As such, while taking on more trips with Uber Eats could bolster your earning potential, we recommend caution to reduce the risks that you'll be taking on a low-rate gig; this is best suited for times when higher tips are more likely, such as in the early evening for dinner.
INTEGRATE THE PARA APP TO MAKE MORE WITH UBER EATS
It's easy to assume that ' to earn more with Uber Eats ' you need to take on more deliveries. However, this often isn't actually the case. In fact, sometimes, you can actually earn less per hour by taking on multiple deliveries or more deliveries and trips at once on Uber Eats than normal.
Why is this? Well, every delivery is worth a different amount. While Uber Eats offers pay based on the mileage and amount of time you spend on the road, there's a catch. The 'time on the road' payment is only equivalent to around $9 per hour ' not an overly impressive hourly rate! As such, if you want to increase your gig work earnings, it's important to consider ways to take on higher-value orders and manage your time more efficiently.
Luckily, there's a simple solution here with the Para personal dispatch tool. Para is a specialist driver utility app that makes gig work so much simpler. In turn, you can streamline your time, take on better-value jobs, and generally make more from your gig work. After all, you're putting a lot of time into making deliveries; a fair rate of pay is only fair!
How Para Works for Uber Eats
Para offers several excellent tools that can help make Uber Eats deliveries substantially more practical and profitable overall. Just a handful of these include:
- Showing the pick-up restaurant location and the exact delivery address
- Displaying the total estimated mileage for the trip, which allows you to estimate the overall trip value. Dollar-per-mile estimates further help with this, helping you choose those trips that are likely to be the most lucrative and offer the best hourly rate for your time.
- Restaurant and building flagging, so you can avoid delivering to customers that don't pay well or accepting orders from restaurants with long idle times while preparing food.
- Providing total drive time estimates allows further customization of trip acceptance metrics, making it possible for delivery drivers to choose gigs that fit their schedules.
- Enabling multiapping offers a new way for Uber Eats drivers to earn by delivering for several apps at once, offering more earning flexibility than ever!
These features are an excellent option to ensure that you're getting the most from your delivery efforts. What's more, numerous excellent new features are in the works to ensure that drivers get great results with Uber Eats; most notably, the in-development tip prediction feature may eventually help drivers take on deliveries with greater potential payouts.
Learning to use Para is easy ' so, why not give it a try?
Using Para with Multiapping to Get More Delivery Trips
Struggling to get more delivery trips through Uber Eats? Or perhaps you've found that getting more delivery trips seems to correlate to a lower rate of income per delivery? In any case, there's another option ' since Para makes multiapping possible and practical for delivery drivers. With this feature, it's possible to drive for several apps, which can allow you to make the most of each delivery app's unique pros and cons. For example, GrubHub is a great option for getting more trips, while DoorDash is one of the best delivery apps for higher payouts. In fact, DoorDash pays anywhere up to $25 per hour as standard ' or potentially $50 per hour with the right strategy!
FINAL THOUGHTS
If you've been looking to increase your chances of getting trips on Uber Eats, we hope today's guide may have helped. Indeed, in many cases, it's not clear how to get more orders on Uber Eats as a new Uber Eats driver. However, by following today's tips, you can learn how to get more home delivery trips on Uber Eats. Plus, we've also outlined why ' sometimes ' doing more deliveries isn't always the perfect way to bolster your income; so, if you've been feeling a little unsure about how to proceed, be sure to consider whether it's actually worth taking on more jobs, or if you could do better by taking on fewer, higher-paying jobs with help from your Gig HQ, Para, instead.
Extra Reading:
- How Much Do UberEats Drivers Make In 2023?
- Absolute Best Time To Do Uber Eats in 2023
- Veteran Gig Driver Shares Facts About Acceptance Rates. Does Your Uber Eats Acceptance Rate Really Matter?
- How Does Uber Eats Assign Drivers?
- Driver Shares: Here's How To Get The Biggest Orders On Uber Eats
- How to Make More Money as an Uber Eats Driver
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