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May 23, 2024
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Gopuff is a gig app for delivery drivers. Like its competitors, it offers its drivers (or, as it calls them, its delivery partners) the opportunity to earn money by delivering groceries and other items to customers’ homes.
However, not all gig apps are created equal. In this article, we’ll take a closer look at what Gopuff offers to its drivers, weigh the app’s pros and cons, and help you decide whether or not driving for Gopuff is a worthwhile side hustle for you.
Gopuff is a delivery driving gig app that’s similar to Uber Eats and DoorDash. However, while those two apps focus on meal deliveries, Gopuff drivers don’t deliver from restaurants.
Instead, they drive to Gopuff’s warehouses, where they pick up orders that include groceries and other everyday items, such as electronics, cleaning supplies, and—in some areas—alcohol.
You’ll deliver these orders using your own vehicle. As a gig driver, you’re answerable to Gopuff’s warehouse operators (at least to some extent), but you’ll do your job without much supervision. You can listen to music or a podcast while you drive, which many drivers cite as a perk of the job.
Gopuff drivers can pick up gigs in two ways: by scheduling shifts or by working on demand.
Gopuff drivers can sign up for “delivery blocks” that range from two to four hours long. New blocks open up every Thursday; you can use the app to pick shifts you want to work throughout the upcoming week.
On Friday, the app will update to show you which blocks you were accepted for.
Working pre-arranged blocks comes with several advantages over on-demand work:
Because of these advantages, delivery slots are limited and can be difficult to book. We’ve read complaints from drivers alleging that, even when they launch the app right when slots open up on Thursdays, there’s usually nothing available.
Some drivers also claim that this is because some people use bots to reserve all the slots for themselves, although we haven’t been able to independently confirm this.
If you can’t land any blocks, you can also accept gigs on Gopuff when they become available. Doing this is as simple as driving to a Gopuff delivery center and waiting for deliveries.
Obviously, this is easy and flexible, but you won’t receive wait pay or a minimum hourly rate for on-demand work, and there’s no guarantee there will be any gigs available. This means that if you can, it’s better to reserve shifts ahead of time.
As mentioned, in contrast to apps like Uber Eats and Instacart (which send drivers to restaurants and grocery stores), Gopuff drivers pick up deliveries from depots called “micro-fulfillment centers.” Essentially, these are warehouses where orders are prepared ahead of time.
Regardless of whether you’ve scheduled a block or are working on demand, you’ll show up at the depot and wait in your car for your orders.
When a customer places an order, employees at the depot will bag it and place it in a specific bin. When you’re assigned a delivery, the app will direct you to collect the items from the corresponding bin.
You’ll scan it to confirm that you’re picking up the right order, then drive it to its destination. (You may have to scan multiple items—cases of soda or beer, for example, are typically bagged separately)
As mentioned, in certain areas, some Gopuff deliveries include alcohol. When you accept one of these, you’ll need to be a bit more careful with the order.
For one thing, you need to verify the recipient’s ID when delivering the order. This usually involves scanning their driver’s license (or another form of legal ID) with the Gopuff app, but sometimes, you may have to check their ID manually.
In addition, if the recipient of the order appears underage or is clearly intoxicated, Gopuff requires you to refuse to deliver the order and return it to the micro-fulfillment center. You’ll still be paid if this happens.
To ensure you understand all of these rules, you’ll have to pass a short product delivery course when you sign up for Gopuff. If you don’t want to deliver orders with alcohol, you can indicate this in the app, but this will probably lead to you receiving less work.
Gopuff’s website claims you can make $18–$25 per hour by using the app. 1 If that’s true, it’s in line with what you can make on other delivery gig apps, which our research suggests pay around $15–$20 on average.
However, there’s reason to believe that Gopuff’s estimates might be too optimistic, and that the actual average you can make is closer to $10–$20 per hour.
For one thing, Gopuff is a relatively small gig app (especially when compared with giants like DoorDash and Uber), and many online sources claim that there simply isn’t that much work available on it. If you can’t land many shifts or gigs, it’ll be hard to make a worthwhile return on your time.
Gopuff’s guaranteed pay might not help that much, either. It varies from location to location, and Gopuff isn’t upfront about what it is in each locale, but Business Insider reported in 2022 that Gopuff slashed their hourly rate in California to $15, short of the $18–$25 average they cite. The average in other parts of the country might be even lower (gig apps tend to pay fairly high rates in California to compensate for the state’s higher cost of living).
Again, based on the limited information out there, our best guess is that as a Gopuff driver, you’ll make somewhere in the range of $10 to $20 per hour. Where you fall in that range will heavily depend on where you live and how active the Gopuff market is in your city.
Your earnings per order on Gopuff will depend on several factors:
Gopuff offers two payment options: direct deposit through Stripe (Gopuff’s payment processing platform of choice), or Instant Cash Out. You can see the specifics in the table below.
| Option | When you’ll get paid | Associated fees |
|---|---|---|
| Stripe | Weekly (payments are processed each Tuesday). | None |
| Instant Cash Out | 30 minutes or less, but this may vary slightly depending on your bank. | $1.99 |
The requirements to become a delivery partner for Gopuff are pretty standard, and match those of most delivery platforms. In addition to passing a criminal background check and a motor vehicle record (MVR) check, you must meet the following requirements:
Note that not all auto insurance policies cover commercial driving (and gig work counts). Check with your insurance provider to see if yours does; if it doesn’t, you may need to purchase additional insurance so that you’re adequately covered while out on deliveries.
Gopuff doesn’t conduct their own background checks on drivers. Instead, they contract with a third-party company, Checkr, which also runs checks for Uber, DoorDash, and many other gig apps.
Most people will be able to pass this background check. It won’t be a problem if you have minor black marks on your record (e.g., a couple of speeding tickets)—you’ll only really run into trouble if you have major vehicular offenses, such as DUIs, or felony convictions from the past 7 years.
Checkr will usually take just a couple of days to complete your check, but may take 1–2 weeks. If your application stalls out for longer than that, review your application in Checkr’s Candidate Portal.
If something about your background check seems incorrect (Checkr has been known to mix up the records of people who have similar names), you can contact Gopuff’s own support team at partners@gopuff.com and explain the issue. They may be able to intervene on your behalf.
Gopuff currently operates in more than 650 cities across the US. Enter your ZIP code or state on Gopuff’s signup page to find out if the app is active in your area. If not, you can check back in a few months to see if they’ve opened a new location near you.
You can register to be a driver on Gopuff’s signup page. The system will ask you to fill in your personal information, including your name, address, and cell phone number. You’ll also have to choose your location.
Bear in mind that some locations are full and are not currently accepting drivers. This happened to us when we tested the process in Santa Monica, CA; the system informed us that we’d been placed on a waiting list.
If you apply for an area with vacancies, you’ll need to submit proof of insurance, a photocopy of your driver’s license, and W9 tax information.
Once your background check clears (which, as mentioned, may take anywhere from just a day or to several weeks), you’ll be able to start accepting orders and delivering.
You can get the Gopuff Driver app using the buttons below.
We’ve been over how Gopuff works and approximately how much you can get paid on the platform. However, that’s only part of the picture.
When you consider whether or not Gopuff is worth driving for, you also need to look at your expenses.
As a driver for any gig app, you’ll be classified as an independent contractor, not an employee, which means that you’ll be responsible for paying for your own gas, as well as your taxes and vehicle maintenance. (This can get surprisingly expensive, since you’ll be spending a lot more time than usual behind the wheel).
It’s hard to estimate exactly what these expenses will total; that depends on a lot of factors, including how fuel-efficient your vehicle is and where you’ll be driving. Stop-and-go traffic in cities is generally rougher on vehicles than driving in suburban or rural environments, and so on.
We’ve interviewed a number of gig drivers, who’ve recommended generally setting the following budget:
It’s possible that your expenses will be higher or lower than that, but setting aside that much is reasonable in the beginning.
All of this will eat into your profits by 35%, leaving you with just 65% of what you made on paper. Put another way, if you’re able to make $15 per hour (right in the middle of the range we listed above), you’ll actually pocket just $9.75 of that.
For context, $9.75 is a relatively low rate, although not a terrible one. It’s higher than the federal minimum wage of $7.25, but it’s also lower than the minimum wage in 29 states and Washington, DC, as of May 2024. 3
To get a clearer sense of what it’s like to be a Gopuff driver, you can read reviews from drivers on websites like Indeed and Glassdoor (as well as in Reddit communities like r/GoPuff).
Of course, these reviews aren’t always fair. On one hand, companies have an incentive to encourage their workers to leave positive ratings; on the other, people tend to visit sites like Glassdoor when they’re upset, not when they’re satisfied. Both of these can skew companies’ scores in different directions. However, scoping out online reviews is still one of the best ways to gauge the overall sentiment toward a gig app.
We’ve pulled out a sample of three fairly representative reviews from Indeed:
One delivery driver has mostly positive things to say about Gopuff. They write that “the work is generally easy” and that the atmosphere is relaxed, with the management at their local warehouse treating drivers well.
They do strongly recommend driving a vehicle that gets decent gas mileage (and imply that it’s better to drive a durable car, due to how driving around all day will impact its value). Besides this, they say that “the main challenge is waiting for trips on slow days”—a common theme in these reviews. Many drivers seem fairly happy with the gigs on Gopuff, with their main complaint being that there simply aren’t enough of them.
In a mixed review, another driver says that at its best, Gopuff is a decent gig. They speak positively about how deliveries work—they prefer driving to a single warehouse instead of “being pinged around town from restaurant to restaurant” (the way DoorDash works), and like that instead of standing in line, they just have to “scan the bags and go.”
However, they also have complaints about the amount of work on the app, writing that “it seems that if you drop even one block, you won’t get on the schedule for weeks.”
They also have serious concerns about safety, claiming that in their city (Greensboro, NC), Gopuff’s warehouse is in a dangerous part of town, and that Gopuff regularly sends them to “sketchy motels and apartment complexes” with alcohol and tobacco orders.
“For the kinds of terrible neighborhoods we deliver to, base pay needs to be higher,” they write, adding that “I think we should be paid more to deliver age restricted products.”
For obvious reasons, these complaints might not apply in your neighborhood. However, they highlight the variability of delivery driving. Your local market conditions—including both how much work you’ll get and how safe it will be—are largely down to luck.
A third Pittsburgh-based driver acknowledges that Gopuff is an easy gig, but says that in their area, wait times for orders are “ridiculous.”
They claim that Gopuff “will give a mass message to all drivers in the area asking for more delivery people,” but when they actually show up at the warehouse, there are frequently no orders waiting for them. They also say that their warehouse workers are slow to get new orders ready, and that their base pay is too low (and tips are rare).
The reviews about Gopuff paint a fairly clear picture. It isn’t a terrible gig, but there’s no guarantee you’ll get enough work to make it worth the time and effort you’ll sink into it.
It’s worth reiterating that delivery driving apps are extremely variable. An app that’s lucrative in one neighborhood can be barely worth using in another, and vice versa.
The good news is that, like all gig apps, Gopuff is easy to sign up for and doesn’t require a firm commitment, so you can give it a try and either stick with it or abandon it for another app, depending on what you discover.
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