"Delivery Only" on the offer card can mean a bag of groceries that's already packed, a trunk full of Target boxes, or a seven-hour van route out of a warehouse in the suburbs.
Same label. Different jobs, different stats, different math.
The retailer pickup
This is the one most shoppers mean. A retailer packs the order, you pick it up and drive it over. No shopping. Shipt's Delivery Only FAQ pitches them as good for pairing with other orders because they go quick.
Some rules worth knowing. You can claim up to four with the same delivery window. Time-flexible ones say "deliver by" instead of a window, so you can grab them any time between the ready-for-pickup time and the deadline. Shipt wants you at the store about 15 minutes before the window starts, because showing up earlier than that and the order might not be ready.
And if you show up for a time-flexible bundle and nothing's ready? Shipt pays $7 for the bundle.
Tips exist here, sort of. Shipt's words: certain retailers offer tipping at checkout, so you "may receive tips for some Delivery Only orders." Some. Not most, in practice, and there's no way to see ahead of time which retailers prompt for one.
The Target Delivery Only route
Different animal entirely. You pull into a Target, scan a QR code on the parking sign, show your license to a team member, and load carts of packages into your car.
The Target routes page lays it out. Routes get offered as early as 5 a.m. and the first arrival window is 7 a.m. You get a 15-minute arrival window, and show up late and you may be released from the route. Then 30 minutes to load. Routes come in small, medium, and large, and you're supposed to pick one that fits your car.
That last part matters more than it sounds. Packages that don't fit, you leave on the cart unscanned. Your pay can then be adjusted below what the offer card said. Claim a large route in a Corolla and you've just volunteered for a pay cut.
Delivery is time-flexible. You can drop packages in any order you want, you scan each one and take a proof-of-delivery photo, and anything undeliverable goes back to the same Target within an hour after the deliver-by time. Shipt says you're still paid for making that return.
One line on that page deserves more attention than it gets: Target Delivery Only routes "do not count towards your total order count."
The package driver route
Then there's the version Shipt markets as a separate gig. The driver sign-up page is all packages, no shopping, and your first stop every day is a Target pick-up location. Shipt lists hubs around Atlanta, Austin, Chicago, Cleveland, Dallas, Denver, Detroit, Houston, Minneapolis, Philadelphia, and South Florida.
These are long. Shipt's own averages: a medium vehicle runs 3 to 5 hours with about 30 packages, a large vehicle 5 to 7 hours with 50 or more, a Sprinter van 7 hours plus with 80 or more.
If you already shop, there's a faster sign-up path. Same app.
What none of them build
Here's where the three versions agree, and it's the part that decides whether Delivery Only should be your week or your filler.
Nobody rates you. Delivery Only customers order through the retailer, not Shipt, so there's no option to rate you and nothing for rating forgiveness to act on. Target routes get their own route stats instead, pickup success and delivery success, measured over your last 15 routes.
Nobody adds you as a preferred shopper either. Preferred only works on shop-and-deliver, which is why we've called Delivery Only a dead end for new shoppers before.
Still true for building a book of good members. But that framing assumes you want the shopper job. Some people really don't. They want the car, a podcast, and no substitution texts. For them the question isn't whether Delivery Only builds a preferred list. It's whether the route pays for the miles.
The miles are the whole job
A shop-and-deliver order is mostly time in a store. A route is mostly time on the road, so the vehicle cost is proportionally much bigger, and nobody's showing it to you on the offer card.
Run one. Say a medium route drives 60 miles, and the hub is 15 miles from your house. Thirty miles there and back plus sixty on the route is 90 miles. At the IRS standard rate of 76 cents a mile, the one in effect since July 1, that's $68.40 of vehicle cost. The IRS rate isn't what you spend on gas that day. It's gas, wear, tires, insurance, and depreciation spread across the mile, which is what the car actually costs you.
So the offer has to clear $68.40 before you've earned a cent.
A $110 route leaves $41.60. Four hours on the route plus roughly 25 minutes each way to the hub is about four hours fifty. That's $8.61 an hour. A $95 route leaves $26.60, or $5.50 an hour.
Those route and offer numbers are made up, because Shipt doesn't publish route pay. Swap in your own. The shape of the result won't change much: routes that look fine as a lump sum get ugly fast once the miles come out, and the commute to a hub in another suburb is unpaid.
Log them either way. Every one of those 90 miles is deductible, and a route day is the easiest place to lose a whole day of mileage because you forgot to start the tracker at 6:40 a.m.
How shop-and-deliver compares
Fewer miles per dollar of pay, more minutes. The store time is where the work is. And the upside isn't on the offer card at all, because it comes from tips and from members who request you again.
That's the trade. Delivery Only is legible and flat. Shop-and-deliver is messier and has a ceiling that moves.
Measure both the same way, pay minus mileage divided by every hour including the drive out, and your real hourly rate will tell you which one your metro actually rewards. It won't be the same answer everywhere.
Auto Tip Map is an Android app that saves every order, tip, and mile automatically, so you can compare what different kinds of days actually paid after the car takes its cut.