Make Good Money Shopping for Shipt: A Shipt Shopper Review

 Recently I wrote about my experience shopping for Instacart (you can read about it here). Well this past week I tried out shopping for Shipt, and it was a GREAT experience. There are things that I prefer about Shipt and things that I prefer about Instacart but overall, I like the way Shipt is formatted better. Ultimately, to make the most out of your time, I actually advise doing both at the same time but I'll make another post about that specifically. 

As with Instacart, Shipt is a service where customers send in an order to a store and the shoppers do the shopping for them and deliver the items to the customer's house. With Instacart, you log on and then you receive notices about available batches, as they're called, near you. But with Shipt, you put in the schedule you want to work ahead of time and receive notifications for batches during those times in your specified area. This could be days before or during the time. I generally receive most of the notices in the morning as I put my schedule starting at noon. This works out nicely because you can plan not only your day, but you can plan out how the route.

What do I mean by plan your route? Well for example, I may have an order to deliver between 1-2pm from Target and another order to deliver from 2-3pm from Party City. Well the Party City in my town is right across the street from Target. So I will go do the shopping for the Target order, then stop by Party City to pick up that order (as long as it's not balloons because that takes up a lot of space!). Then I deliver the Target order and then the Party City order. I've even planned it out once where I did this but the delivery for Party City passed Best Buy which I had an order for so I picked that up on the way to the Party City delivery then delivered that one. Being able to do this saves a lot of time which leaves you open to do more shopping which is how you make the good money.

Now, there were some times where I would have an hour or more before my next Shipt delivery and nothing coming in. This is where I think doing both Shipt and Instacart works out well. Turn on Instacart during that time and chances are you will get something to fill the time. Most things take about an hour unless the delivery is quite a ways away. 

With Shipt alone, I averaged $18.44 an hour. But when combined with Instacart, I averaged $23 an hour. 

Pros:

• Flexible hours. You decide when you want to work.
• Pretty good pay and you are able to stay in your area
• You get exercise! 

Cons:

• Sometimes orders are gone before you can accept them
• It can be difficult to deliver to people in apartments and/or busy streets with no parking
• The app isn't as clear as Instacart sometimes and has trouble updating often

I highly recommend this as a side gig or even a main gig. Depending on how things go with my work, I may switch over to doing deliveries permanently as I enjoy it a lot and now see the potential for high earnings. Sign up to be a Shipt shopper here and use my Shopper ID: 100062822 at sign up. Sign up for Instacart here. Read a list of pros and cons of each here.

Something else I learned, if you live in California, there is now a guaranteed earnings for anyone working these types of platforms (Uber, Lyft, Instacart, Shipt, Door Dash, Grub Hub, etc). This helped in the earnings amount, especially during the short Instacart deliveries. If you want to learn more about the guaranteed earning in California and how to utilize it to your advantage, read this post here.