When you receive your cart filled with delivery packages, you will also receive a small paper slip with a wealth of information about the deliveries you are about to make. Use the information provided to your advantage to learn as much as you can about the route before you begin driving.
Below is the information provided on the paper slip.
For each delivery route:
- Route ID
- Route Length (in minutes)*
- Total weight*
- Pickup location
and for each delivery destination:
- Sequence #
- Order ID
- Transit time*
- Service time*
- Merchant
- Zip Zone
- Customer address*
- Package count*
- Order weight*
The most important bits of information are in bold above and explained below.
Route length: listed at the top of the slip, in minutes. This will tell you the length of time they expect your route to take, including 4 – 8 minutes per stop, and time to return to the warehouse. For each 2 hour delivery block, the total route length is usually 90 minutes or less, so if you get a late start due to late arrival and sign in, your chances of late deliveries will be higher. The driving time estimates are on the conservative side and are matched to expected traffic conditions, so unless there are extreme traffic conditions, the route length tends to be fairly accurate. Use this information to first get a sense of whether you will be pressed for time or not and budget your time accordingly.
Total weight: listed next to route length. You don’t necessarily need to get this information from the slip, as it will be quite obvious from the contents of your cart. Some orders can be extremely heavy (e.g. cases of bottled water / soda) so this is good to know in advance as it may take you a bit more time to load/unload/deliver.
Transit time: listed for each delivery destination. Typically quoted based on expected traffic conditions and in the sequence recommended by Amazon. This will tell you how spread out the delivery points are, if you follow the delivery sequence recommended.
Service time: listed for each delivery destination next to transit time. Typically 4 minutes per destination, but sometimes Amazon will allot up to 8 minutes for destinations known to have long service times. This typically includes large apartment complexes or gated communities. Keep in mind, though, that Amazon’s predictions are hit or miss so these should be taken with a grain of salt.
Customer address: listed for each delivery destination. Look for either Apt, Ste, or nothing, which will tell you whether you are delivering to an apartment, office, or home, respectively. Also, familiarize yourself with the house number so that when you are near the destination you can immediately be on the lookout for that number without needing to repeatedly look for it in the app.
Package count and package weight: listed for each delivery destination on the far right. Use this information to know how much of the packages and weight is being delivered where so that you can optimize your parking strategy and save time during your deliveries.
