Basic Background
As anyone that ever joined ‘Larry the Loadie’ will know, sometimes the new-wave of ‘Uber’ style apps that appear for couriers crash and burn very quickly. They arrive with good intent and great ideas, but somehow they just don’t seem to pull in the users they need.
It’s all about the battle of trying to encourage customers to sign up to post their delivery requirements, but unless you have the drivers available, they’re reluctant to do so.
And you can’t convince the drivers to sign up and sit around waiting, if you don’t have any customers.
Despite that, DeliveryApp are actually doing fairly well (from what we know).
They already have one thing that Larry never seemed to achieve – job postings.
How did we review DeliveryApp?
The only way you can do a fair review of anything like this is to be a user yourself. That’s what we did. So far it’s been approximately 1 year of being registered as a driver.
The Best / Worst Parts of It
The best thing is that it’s free to use and that it’s all quite simple.
Your phone notifies you of job postings, read them and decide if it’s for you. If you want that run then click accept. Nothing too complicated at all.
You’re only going to be dealing direct with DeliveryApp, so unlike Courier Exchange you don’t have hundreds of invoices going out to different companies with all kinds of different payment schedules.
Do the job and update the app at each stage. As soon as it’s complete payment is effectively started. You receive it about a week later to your Stripe account, and then a few days later Stripe transfers into your assigned business banking service
As for bad points; the lack of a real flood of work is the major issue. Nobody can survive on what’s available currently. You’re going to need other work. DeliveryApp is only really going to help you fill in the gaps.
Also we have seen quite a bit of app instability. Some of it was related to a change of phones on our part, but it seemed like a few glitches were caused by a redesign of the app at one stage.
Is it all about the algorithm?
And then there’s the constant notifications of jobs that have already gone. Your mobile phone pings, you look at the alert, then when you tap on the job it tells you a drivers already taken the booking. Even though your opened your phone 8 seconds after the notification.
We don’t know this for sure, but we think there might be an algorithm at play here. A bit like the way apps like Instagram and TikTok decide what things you see – we think DeliveryApp has a way of deciding who is notified of jobs, and in which order.
This isn’t necessarily a bad thing, but it really comes down to how the algorithm is determining who is worthy of seeing the loads.
Do drivers have the ability to prove their worth? Is it all about where you’re based at the time?
Either way, it needs to be better at not ‘false pinging’ people, because that gets annoying quickly. It’s almost ‘Catfishing’ drivers into checking the app when the job’s not there (see screenshot below).
Will it actually get you work and help you earn money?
As with all courier services, it’s really about that old adage from the housing market; Location, location, location.
If you’re out in the wilds of Wales, Scotland, Cornwall etc then it’s probably not going to massively increase your chances.
Meanwhile, for us here in Greater Manchester it’s not done too badly. We can probably count on at least 2-3 job postings per day all year round, but in peak periods that can be more like 5-10. We’re not seeing crazy numbers so far, but they do seem to be climbing year-on-year.
