You'll figure most of this out eventually. Took me about four months and a lot of $9 orders.
The base pay is not the pay
Look at an offer. It shows you a number. On a bad order that number is everything you'll make. On a good one it's about a third.
Tips are the job. Base pay covers gas and not much else once you're past ten miles. Which means every call you make about which orders to take is really a bet on whether a stranger tips.
Nobody frames it that way during onboarding.
Delivery only looks easy and goes nowhere
Shipt will hand you delivery only orders when you're new, in the metros that have them. Target packages, drop on the porch, no shopping.
Easy. Also a dead end.
Those customers mostly don't tip, and they can't add you as a preferred shopper, because preferred only works on shop-and-deliver. So you can run DO all day, collect base pay, and be exactly where you started four months later.
Fine for filling dead time. Don't build a week around them.
Photograph every substitution
Not text. Photo.
Don't send "they're out of the Honey Nut, is store brand okay?" Take a picture of the shelf, including the empty spot, send it, let them choose. This single habit does more for your tips and your ratings than anything else on this list.
Customers aren't mad about substitutions. They're mad about getting home and finding something they didn't agree to.
Text them when you start
"Hey, starting your order now!"
Five seconds. Most shoppers skip it. The ones who don't get noticed.
Your rating is a rolling 50
This one catches people badly. Shipt averages your last 50 ratings, so a single one star doesn't just sting, it sits on your average for the next fifty orders.
Drop below 4.7 and you're in deactivation territory.
The part new shoppers don't know: Shipt has a rating forgiveness process. If a rating was clearly unfair, something outside your control, a store problem, weather, a customer angry about Shipt's own pricing, you can request it be removed. There's a form. Use it. Most shoppers never do, and eat ratings they didn't earn.
Nobody tracks your miles for you
Shipt doesn't track mileage and doesn't reimburse it. That's entirely on you, and it's the single largest tax deduction you have.
The IRS standard rate is 72.5 cents a mile as things stand. Drive 12,000 business miles and that's about $8,700 off your taxable income at that rate. The IRS revises it, sometimes partway through a year, so check the current figure before you file. Miss logging the miles entirely and you pay tax on money that went into tires and gas.
Start on day one. Retroactively reconstructing a year of driving in April is miserable and the IRS wants contemporaneous records anyway.
Preferred shopper is the whole game
A customer gives you five stars, picks an attribute, and Shipt offers to make you their preferred shopper. From then on their orders come to you before anyone else sees them.
No open metro competition. No refreshing. The order just shows up.
Month one this means nothing. Month eight, with a hundred preferred members, your week fills itself. Veterans with big lists report high $20s to mid $30s an hour. New shoppers without one are scraping along at $16 to $22 when tips cooperate. Same zone, same hours.
Everything else on this list is in service of building that list.
Promo pay doesn't fix a bad order
You'll see a promo and feel like you should be out there. Sometimes you should.
But a $6 promo on a 48-item order going eleven miles into an apartment complex with no parking is still a bad order. Do the arithmetic before the fear of missing out does it for you.
The drive back is unpaid
Obvious once you've done it. Invisible when you're new.
You get paid for the trip to the customer. You do not get paid for the trip back toward the store or wherever the next order is. So a delivery ten miles out is a twenty mile round trip on your car, and your real hourly rate has to absorb all of it.
Count the return leg in every decision. Most new shoppers don't, which is how people end up thrilled about a $22 order that lost them money.
Which addresses tip is knowable
Nobody hands you this one. After a few hundred orders you've delivered to the same houses repeatedly, which means the information about who tips is already sitting in your own history.
Tip behavior barely changes. Someone who tipped $14, $11, and $16 is going to land in that neighborhood again. Someone who's stiffed you three times is not a coin flip, they're a pattern.
Most shoppers try to hold it in their head, or type "NT" on an address in Google Maps and hope they scroll past it again at the right moment. Both fail for the same reason: the offer is on your screen for twenty seconds and your memory of a bad Tuesday in March isn't available on demand.
And set aside tax money now
You're a contractor. No withholding, no employer paying half your payroll tax. Self-employment tax alone is 15.3%, and if you owe enough you're expected to pay quarterly.
Put something aside from every deposit. April is a bad month to learn this.
Auto Tip Map is an Android app that saves every order, tip, and address automatically, then shows you an address's history right on the offer, so the "does this person tip" question has an answer instead of a guess.