Two of the biggest food courier giants are battling for their share of the delivery game across Canada, UberEATS vs Skip The Dishes! Which company is better for drivers? We break down the differences between them in pay, flexibility, tips and more to see who comes out on top!
These app-based food ordering technology companies are now having to deal with other players like Foodora and Door Dash competing against them in a couple of the larger cities like Toronto and Vancouver. Though Skip The Dishes and Uber Eats have more market share and are in more cities, the landscape is definitely changing and becoming more competitive to attract both customers and drivers.
With many of the urban regions offering at least both services, let’s discuss the differences between Skip The Dishes and Uber Eats.
- Let’s Get Flexible
- To Bag Or Not To Bag
- Where Do You Think You’re Going?
- Is Cash Really King?
- Tip of the App to You!
- Show Me the Money!
- Skip The Dishes vs UberEATS: Results
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Let’s Get Flexible!
The first difference between the services is how and when you decide to work.
With Skip The Dishes, you sign up for blocks of delivery time. Orders automatically send to you once you sign in on the driver app. The “shifts” are typically 4 hour blocks of time but you can sign up for more than one block.
You can go online at any time and go offline at any time. The only restriction is you can’t work more than 12 hours in a day. Skip The Dishes allows you to end your shift early if you want to get gas or eat lunch. You need to contact them to request they stop orders for that period of time.
With UberEATS you can choose to accept or decline orders all within the app. Skip The Dishes is a bit more of a hassle, as you have to request that the order be reassigned. The dispatch will usually call you to discuss the reassignment. Although Uber does track acceptance rates for orders, some drivers have reported their acceptance rate doesn’t seem to matter.
The flexibility of UberEATS vs Skip The Dishes is a huge bonus for drivers.
Skip The Dishes vs UberEATS: Flexibility
WINNER
To Bag or Not to Bag?
Skip The Dishes requires you to buy two bags from them. A pizza bag and a square delivery bag, both of which are insulated. The cost? Approximately $75 depending on your city! If you have unbranded insulated bags already, you might be in luck. Take pictures of them and send it to Skip The Dishes for approval instead of buying bags from the company. This will avoid the upfront cost, however the requirements are fairly strict for what they will accept.
UberEATS does not require you to have a thermo bag. Some restaurants, particularly pizza places, won’t let you pick up their food without a bag though. In some cities, Uber still ships their insulated bag to you and takes the cost off your first pay. How much? Approximately $15 including shipping! Buying a bag is well worth it, they are fairly cheap and customers appreciate a temperature appropriate meal.
Having an insulated bag helps you transport the food, plus it keeps both customers and restaurants happy. If you’re lucky this step may lead to increased tips from customers!
Skip The Dishes vs UberEATS – Bags
WINNER
Where Do You Think You’re Going?
Skip The Dishes bases your delivery zone on the address you enter when signing up.
The upside is you know the geographical boundaries of where your trip requests and deliveries are going to generally. The down side is that the zones can actually be quite large. Many drivers have reported requests to drive 20 minutes to a restaurant just to pick up the food.
UberEATS has no geographical restrictions. If you are in the suburbs and it’s not busy, just drive downtown. Pick up location is too far for your liking? Just decline it. If you are the free wheeling type, you can just keep accepting trips. Sometimes this can take you on an adventure through the city.
If you accept a trip that brings you further from the area you like to deliver in, you have to drive back unpaid. This is unlikely to happen as much with Skip The Dishes because of the zone limits. Still, being able to drive to new locations when it gets slow makes UberEATS much more appealing and flexible.
Skip The Dishes vs UberEATS – Location
WINNER
Is Cash Really King?
Uber handles payment between you and the customer when you deliver with UberEATS. The only time you are handling money is if the customer tips in you cash at the door. No complaints about that!
Skip The Dishes allows customers to pay with their credit card through the app like UberEATS. Customers also have the choice to pay you, the driver, in cash when you arrive at the door. Overall, this offers many downsides for drivers.
The Downsides of Handling Cash with Skip The Dishes
First, you are always going to need to have a float of $100 on you. This is not ideal for most people, especially if you are tight on cash. Start up costs with Skip The Dishes end up around $175 when you include the cost of the bag.
Second, if the customer wants to pay in cash, you have to pay the restaurant up front. If the customer doesn’t answer the door for example, you are out that money until Skip The Dishes reimburses you on your next pay.
Third, the beauty of cashless transactions is that it makes pickups and drop-offs fast. Paying the restaurant in cash and receiving payment from the customer only ends up increasing your overall trip time.
Lastly, it is also dangerous in some places to carry cash. We have all heard stories of pizza delivery drivers being robbed because people know they have cash on them. Same with taxi drivers. The cashless transaction is what made Uber so appealing for both drivers and customers when it first launched. Drivers avoid the risk of being robbed, plus both customers and drivers enjoy the quick convenience of the in-app payment.
Skip the Dishes vs UberEATS – Payment Methods
WINNER
Tip of the App to You!
You might wonder, why would there be any difference in the amount of tips you receive between Skip The Dishes and UberEATS? There are some important differences between the two companies and how tipping works out for the drivers. So, do UberEATS or Skip The Dishes customers tip better?
Skip The Dishes Tips
There is an advantage to dealing in cash and that is the tips. Only Skip The Dishes allows payment in cash and although it comes with its downsides, customers are more likely to tip you when dealing with money face to face. They will often just round up what they owe you for the food, leaving the rest to you as a tip. If the order comes to $36.50, customers are more inclined to hand you two $20 bills and tell you to keep the change.
The way the apps are set up on the customer side also makes a difference. With Skip The Dishes, the customer is prompted to tip on the checkout page before finalizing the order. In fact, it pre-selects 15% automatically but gives the option of tipping more or less. The customer actually has to enter 0 manually if they don’t want to tip. This is of course only when they select to pay with a credit card.
UberEATS Tips
When Uber first launched its rideshare service they boasted that tips were not required. This was mainly an effort to set themselves apart from taxis, where tipping has always been customary. This appears to have spilled over to the couriers as well. Both rideshare drivers and couriers are seemingly taking a hit with this campaign and a lot of customers are simply not tipping them at all. In fact, there wasn’t even a tipping option when Uber first launched!
Eventually, tipping was added to the customer app however they can only tip after the food arrives. Often times people won’t even check their phone once the food arrives. The next time they log in to the app they are still prompted to tip and rate the driver, however it is less likely they will do so, especially if a long time has passed since the delivery.
The app has changed a couple times since its launch. Currently, customers can add a fixed amount ($1, $2, $5, etc.) tip or manually type in a dollar amount after the delivery is completed. There are some cities in the US testing advance tipping, which is the model Skip The Dishes currently uses and is likely a large part of why the tips are better with them.
Until UberEATS changes their model, Skip The Dishes customers adding 15% (on average) to their order as a tip really boosts your pay, especially with large orders.
Skip The Dishes vs UberEATS – Tips
WINNER
Show Me the Money!
Transparency is important for earnings no matter which company you decide to work for. Both of these companies lack transparency, each in their own way.
Driver Payment Structures
Skip The Dishes does not have “rates of pay” exactly. What they offer is something called Transit Pay. This is simply a flat fee you are paid to drive to their restaurant, pick up the food and deliver it to the customer. They provide no information on how they determine this although it is a given that the longer the trip, the higher the pay.
The nice thing about Skip The Dishes though is before you accept an order you can actually see the transit pay in advance, as well as the pick up and drop off location. If the customer is paying with a credit card in the app, you can also see the tip they entered.
UberEATS actually posts their pay rates for each city online, which is calculated using 4 factors: a flat fee for pick-up and drop-off, a rate per km/mile that you travel from the restaurant to the customer and a per minute fee for the trip as well. These rates are estimated and not exact though.
Unlike Skip The Dishes, UberEATS does not disclose the pick up location, drop off location or pay in advance. Once you accept the order, the restaurant becomes known to you. Once you confirm you picked up the order, the drop off location shows up. Not until you have confirmed you dropped off the order will you see your pay. You do get detailed information on how the fare was calculated but this can get confusing with boosts and commissions.
You can use our calculator to check your pay below if you are having trouble adding it all up.
Who Pays Better, Skip The Dishes or UberEATS?
A frequently asked question and the most difficult one to answer is who pays better, Skip The Dishes or UberEATS? This can depend on a number of factors, including the city (and even the area) you are delivering in, the times and days you are working and of course how good you are at the job.
The average pay for a Skip The Dishes Driver in Canada is $18.56. The average pay for an UberEATS Driver in Canada is $17.44. This is based on figures reported by Indeed.com.
These numbers are of course based on relatively small sample sizes and self-reporting. On Glass Door for example, we found the numbers were a bit lower for both companies, with UberEATS actually coming out slightly ahead of Skip The Dishes. So, given the numbers seem to be pretty close, who should you work for if it is all about the money?
Steady days? Work with Skip The Dishes
If your area is providing you with steady order requests, we recommend working for Skip The Dishes. Because the tips are typically pretty good compared to UberEATS. With people often tipping on a percentage basis, this can really add up. However, it is not clear Skip The Dishes themselves pays more than UberEATS when you exclude the customer tips.
Our final assessment is that you should actually work for both to try them out in your city. It appears that when UberEATS boosts are low (we explain how UberEATS boosts work in this article) then you should sign up for a Skip The Dishes shift. If you are skilled enough, you can do UberEATS orders when you don’t have any Skip The Dishes orders assigned to you to fill in the gaps if it is slow. If the boosts are high, then usually UberEATS will pay you more on average than Skip The Dishes, even without tips.
Skip The Dishes vs UberEATS – Pay
WINNER
Skip The Dishes vs UberEATS: Results
In this head to head, who emerges victorious? Who should you be driving for, Skip The Dishes or UberEATS?
UberEATS comes out on top in all categories except for tips, where you will most likely earn more with Skip The Dishes. We also discussed that when the boosts are low with UberEATS you might be better off working for Skip The Dishes.
Our recommendation is to sign up for both and play them off each other, especially if you are doing this full time. Work for Skip The Dishes on your average day or weeknight and jump on the high boosts with UberEATS during the peak times. If you are only doing this as a part-time gig, we recommend you just stick with UberEATS and deliver during those high boosts periods.
All things considered in the battle between Skip The Dishes vs UberEATS, we have to crown a winner that comes out on top in the most amount of categories. Drum roll ……………..
Do you think we got the pros and cons between Skip The Dishes vs UberEATS right or wrong? Let us know on social media or in the comments below!
