When it comes to the gig economy, merchants now have countless options available in the marketplace to utilize to offer delivery to their customers. However, many of these solutions are designed to benefit the solution provider more than the merchants and drivers using the platform. This can leave business owners in a difficult situation. In today’s market, it is vital for merchants to offer delivery options. But, when using many platforms, offering delivery can end up hurting your bottom line more than helping it.
In this guide, we’ll take a look at how to choose the right delivery app in the gig economy that will yield the highest amount of benefit to your business and to the drivers responsible for fulfilling your orders. The end result is that you can provide quality options for your customers without putting your business’s profits at risk.
Don’t Pay Percentage Commissions
The majority of delivery apps work by charging merchants a percentage of each order. These commission rates are often high and can quickly eat away at the small amount of profit you earn on each customer order placed.
In addition to charging you a commission, a lot of third-party delivery apps also take a chunk of change from your delivery drivers. These costs can leave your drivers equally frustrated, leading to fewer available drivers.
When looking for the right delivery solution, opt for a platform that charges you a flat rate rather than a percentage commission. This is beneficial in multiple ways. For starters, when you pay a flat, monthly rate, you can more easily manage your costs. This makes it simpler to ensure profits when providing delivery options to your customers.
Secondly, this allows your drivers to benefit as well because they earn more money. Having happier, more motivated drivers equals better delivery services. This trickles down and benefits your customers, who will have a positive delivery experience.
Build Relationships with Quality Drivers
Ideally, when you choose a delivery app, you’ll want to pick one that allows you to build relationships with quality drivers. Most apps act as a middleman between you and the drivers in your area. It is extremely difficult for you to interact with these drivers, and, in many cases, if there are issues, you have no way of hearing about them.
One example of how you can build better relationships with drivers is through a waitlist feature. A waitlist feature allows delivery drivers to arrive at your physical location and notifies you that they are available for delivery. Once they arrive and are queued on the waitlist, the feature will automatically assign them the next available order. This works on a first-come, first-to-work basis.
This feature is a prime example of how you can build a relationship with drivers who are looking for consistent work. They can continue to return to your location, receiving order assignments immediately. This allows drivers to generate secure and reliable income and cuts down on the amount of driving necessary to earn more money.
As a merchant, this feature not only allows you to interact with the same drivers, building quality relationships with these workers, but it provides you with similar benefits to having delivery drivers on staff minus with the high costs of personally hiring drivers.
Choose Easy Integration
Ideally, you want to pick a platform that allows you to create your own branded app and avoid the heavy per-transaction fees of most platforms. However, it is still beneficial to pick a platform that will integrate with the third parties you wish to continue to utilize.
This can be particularly helpful during the early growth stage of your business. Integrating customer orders from both your own website and mobile apps (direct channel) with third-party platforms such as GrubHub, DoorDash, Postmates, and Uber Eats makes it possible to expand your reach in an area quickly.
Additionally, full integration allows your customers to order through whichever channels they prefer.
Over time, you might be able to transition away from a reliance upon these third-party platforms, but be sure that the delivery app you choose will easily integrate orders from any channel.
Own Your Data
Another pitfall of many available delivery apps is that they do not allow merchants to own their customer data. This makes it difficult for you to learn more about customer preferences, and it can be nearly impossible to build relationships with your customers.
Look for a platform that allows you to own 100% of your customer data. This data will be highly profitable for you as you look to market, promote, advertise, and interact with your customers.
This connection is key. When you use a platform that allows direct communication with your drivers and your customers, you can respond to feedback in real-time. You can help resolve problems and deliver outstanding customer service to create loyal customers who continue to come back for more.
Furthermore, when you own your customer data, you can also export this data for use in additional campaigns and strategies.
Benefit from Transparent Pricing
Along with picking a delivery app that does not charge you commission fees on each transaction, look for a company that provides transparent pricing.
For example, when you sign up as a merchant with Ally, you’ll be grandfathered in for five years at your current rate if we ever raise our prices.
For small businesses, this is incredibly important. When you choose a platform that is upfront about what you’ll pay now and into the future, you can better manage your costs. When you work with an app that continually changes its pricing structure, it can wind up eating away at your profits and creating an unpredictable pattern of spend.
Give Ally a Spin
If you are looking for a platform that delivers all of the above and more, we invite you to give Ally a try. Our platform has zero commissions, zero service fees, and zero hidden fees. With Ally, you can take back your customers with your own branded experience. You’ll own 100% of your customer data, and you can use this platform to attract and grow a dedicated following.
Other benefits of Ally include the following:
- Grow your business through the use of our enterprise-grade marketing tools
- Fully control your brand’s reputation and customer experience by interacting directly with customers
- Partner with over 100,000 drivers who are also benefiting from a platform designed to allow them to earn more
- Integrate our platform directly with your current POS system, SMS providers, and other systems
- Quickly and easily aggregate orders across third-party providers and marketplaces into your POS
Signing up is easy, and our team is here to help you along the way. Our goal is to help merchants and drivers benefit from the best technology in the gig economy without eating away at profits. We will continue to provide industry-leading solutions, and we look forward to becoming your trusted partner for delivery.