Amazon “on-demand” delivery service may struggle to scale up
A journalist who signed up to be an Amazon Flex on-demand delivery driver to explore life is like as an independent contractor for for the retail giant has serious concerns about the huge challenges ahead to scale up the pilot program across America. He was given little advice on how to organise his deliveries, was forced to fight for spare delivery slots, and had to use a complicated driver app, he said.

SEATTLE—Late last year, Amazon launched a pilot program in one of its biggest Amazon Prime Now markets to ship more packages within that service's two-hour window. It was a "sharing economy"-styled system where anybody could sign up to deliver Amazon's packages—and get paid $18 an hour while doing so, plus tips.

Anybody, you say?

So I went ahead and signed up for this service, known as Amazon Flex, especially since I live just a few miles away from Amazon's primary Seattle campus. After submitting personally identifying information via Amazon's "Delivery" app (exclusively for Android phones) and watching a boatload of orientation videos, the company deemed me worthy of handling customers' precious cargo.

The above video was a bit of a pain to coordinate, as Amazon Flex differs in a big way from app-driven, be-your-own-boss services like Uber and Lyft: you have to fight for open delivery slots. Amazon has a core group of contract workers who do the bulk of the delivery work for most of its Prime Now markets; thus, anybody who wants to make a few bucks helping as a Flex driver can't just turn their phone on and expect a bunch of packages awaiting your delivery efforts. Instead, Flex users are expected to sign up for time windows in advance and stick to them.

Once I finally locked down a time slot, I drove to one of Amazon's package-sorting facilities in neighboring Kirkland, Washington, where I received a brief explanation about how the warehouse space worked and was given a slew of packages to drive to customers' homes. I had to drop a giant bag of dog food in front of a palatial house in a suburb, then take a pair of relatively heavy bags to an apartment complex a few miles away. The app loaded driving maps and walked me through barcode scans of the packages every step of the way, and the whole process was relatively painless.

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Packages are given to Flex drivers in "two-hour" increments—meaning, Flex drivers are given customer orders that are clumped together geographically, with an expectation that deliveries are completed within two hours, even with traffic in consideration. If drivers want to Flex for a full day, they are expected to drive back to a sorting facility to pick up each additional two-hour clump of customer orders.

The app includes a "masked two-way communication" service so that drivers and customers can call each other as needed without exchanging phone numbers, and it keeps tabs on drivers via GPS to confirm that deliveries have reached their expected destination. As independent contractors, Amazon Flex drivers are expected to cover all their own costs for driving and wear-and-tear, and multiple Washington car insurance companies confirmed to Ars that interested drivers should look into business-driving insurance plans. Drivers in other participating Prime Now cities, which are up to 28 metropolitan areas in the United States, will want to check with their insurers for more information.

Update: An Amazon representative reached out to Ars Technica with a clarification about default insurance for Flex drivers: "Should something occur during the period when the individual is delivering on behalf of Amazon, we provide $1 million in commercial automobile liability coverage per incident, $1 million in uninsured/underinsured motorist coverage per incident if the other motorist doesn’t carry adequate insurance, and $50,000 in contingent comprehensive and collision coverage per incident."

Listing image by Will Lemke