Uber Eats rolled out its new fees structure this week, and most people are confused about what the new fees mean. Instead of a booking fee for each order, Uber is now splitting up its fee into a delivery and service fee, and adding a small order fee of $2 when your order total is less than $10. Here’s what it actually means.
From the homepage of the app, you can see the delivery fees. Ranging from 49 cents to $3.99 in New York, at a glance it looks more appealing and affordable than the previous fees of $2.49 to $6.49. But once you start adding items to your cart and reach the order page, you can scroll to see an additional service fee that’s 15 percent of your order total. The new delivery fee plus service fee add up to roughly what the old booking fee used to be — plus or minus a few dollars or cents. So to casual customers, at a glance, the low delivery fees from the homepage can be misleading.
…Compounding the confusion, drivers don’t receive a cut of the delivery fee. Uber pays drivers a per-mile rate based on how far they’ve driven, regardless of what the passenger is paying. Drivers get a fixed fee for pickup at the restaurant, a fixed drop-off fee for each location, and a rate based on distance traveled. Meanwhile, the customer pays Uber an assortment of fees. Restaurants pay Uber a service fee and then Uber makes whatever is leftover after paying the driver.
What that adds up to is actually very little for the driver, says Campbell. He says that “based off surveys we’ve run in the past, Uber Eats pays the lowest of the major food/delivery services (Postmates, DoorDash, Caviar, Amazon Flex).”