Improving our approach to Shopper earnings

Shopping for groceries is not your typical gig. Shoppers make hundreds of decisions every day in an effort to delight their customers: which avocado to pick, what replacements are OK, how to pack the bags for a delivery. Some orders are quick — just a few essentials — while others require more time and effort to get customers what they need. As we talked with Shoppers about these challenges, we wanted to know more.

What we heard

Over the past six months, we’ve reached out to Shoppers and held interviews, organized focus groups, and conducted surveys. After gathering feedback from thousands of Shoppers from across the country, we’ve learned a lot about Shopper earnings. Most importantly:

• Shoppers value more transparency about batches. Before accepting a batch, they want to know more information — how much they’ll earn from the batch, the specific items in the batch, and more details about the store and customer locations.
• Shoppers appreciate consistency in earnings. They want all batches offered to them to be similarly attractive, so they can spend less time evaluating whether or not to accept a batch. The per-item commission works for standard batches, but it doesn’t always make sense in specific situations, such as orders with very few items or orders with long drives.

What we’re doing about it

Based on this feedback, we’ve been exploring ways to provide more transparency and better match Shopper earnings with the time and difficulty of each batch. We’ve designed a new batch acceptance screen that highlights an estimated earnings total, the specific items in the batch and a map with store and customer addresses. After completing each batch, it includes a detailed breakdown of total earnings.

But how do we calculate earnings for each batch? Shoppers have asked us to consider concerns such as: the time it takes to shop and deliver, distance to and from the store, weight and size of order, the store the order is being shopped at. We agree these factors make each batch unique, so we’re building a system that takes these factors into account to generate unique earnings for each batch.

Here are screenshots from our testing that showcase possible new batch acceptance and batch summary screens:

Starting small before we go big

Any time we work on something as important as Shopper earnings, it’s critical that we get the changes right. To ensure we’ve landed on the right design, we are first testing these changes with Shoppers in Boulder, CO.

We started last month with a group of sixteen Boulder Shoppers to get their insights and suggestions for improvement. We shopped with them, conducted focus groups, and asked them to provide feedback after each batch — all to help us refine this new structure. Based on their feedback, we’ve made dozens of adjustments to our approach, and are now rolling out the changes to all Shoppers in Boulder.

Gathering your feedback

Over the next few weeks, we will be gathering detailed feedback and making improvements before expanding these changes to other regions. We’ll use this blog to showcase the final designs, and we’ll let Shoppers know when the new structure is being released in your area.

We’re always interested in hearing from you. If you have ideas or feedback regarding this redesigned structure, please send us your feedback here.