Lame title but let me explain,
I had Uber eats and was a driver, and I didn’t really like it but at the same time I had applied for Instacart and I’m in the process of signing up for that.
I live in a small town off the #1 in Canada and it takes about 25-30 minutes to get into the city on a good day. My town is also full of elderly, and considering people have to travel so much to get into the city, they make a day out of travelling down there.
I want to advertise the fact that I am an Instacart delivery person who is willing to go into the city to pick up groceries, prescriptions, whatever it may be. So my question is: does Instacart create batches for drivers to pick up in proximity to the store, or proximity to the person?
In other terms, will I need to actually be on the road near these stores for a chance to pick them up? Or can I stay in my home, keep the app running, and check every few minutes to see if anyone from my town requested something?
First of, let me state that while I have a shopper account, I never ended up keeping any of the orders I accepted. But, I have actually used it and done every part but shopping, and I know a bit about how it offers
Unfortunately, it is likely you will need to be closer to the store to get any orders. Your current proximity to the customers does not affect what orders you see, as they care more about proximity to store. I can’t say for certain of you will actually be able to see orders from so far away. When I started, I could only see stores in my home city. I live in Virginia now and despite the being many many more stores in “reasonable” proximity, I still only can easily see orders near me.
The big issue you are going to face with this plan is determining if they actually offer groceries to your area. I assume they do as you signed up, but I can’t imagine it is cheap to order there or easy to find a driver to accept the order. But let us imagine they do offer. You won’t ever be able to do enough at a time to justify the time it takes to go back and forth. There is a max on the number of customers they will let you shop for at a time, and I believe it is 2 if they are at the same store with similar home addresses and shopping times. So, if you are only doing your home town, it would realistically be 2 orders every 90 minutes. That assumes your are at the store already. If you are really really fast at shopping, it is 75 minutes. But you still have the drive to and from that is killing all of your working time.
The other problem you will face is dealing with other shoppers who will simply accept anything no matter how ridiculous it would be for them. These are usually part of the constant batch of new shoppers that gig companies pick up as they don’t know enough yet how best to pick and choose. Or, they are the other group who pick it up and do it while they are doing orders on food delivery apps as well. Not a lot of those around, but I have seen it.
So, moral of the story is don’t do this. If you want to deliver groceries to your town, I would offer that service yourself.