What Is It Like to Deliver Packages Part-Time for JD.com for a Day?

On the whole, you won't want to do it

Online shoppers used to wait half a week for an order. Then came next-day delivery, then same-day delivery, and now delivery to the door within an hour. Over the past few years, e-commerce delivery has become more than twice as fast.

Delivery has also grown more expensive. The free-shipping threshold of 39 yuan, once the industry norm, is gone: Amazon now requires 99 yuan, and JD.com raised its own to 79 yuan this year. Delivering to convenience stores is another way to cut costs. In March, in an interview at the Boao Forum for Asia, Liu Qiangdong announced that JD.com would use idle labor to deliver parcels, including the "square-dancing aunties."

Strip away the "square-dancing aunties" gimmick, and what JD.com wants to do looks much like Uber and Didi: a mobile app hands out orders, and payment draws people to grab them and deliver. JD.com calls the service JD Crowdsourcing. Last week, JD Daojia, JD.com's one-hour delivery service, began formally recruiting participants in Beijing. On May 21, a QDaily reporter signed up for JD Crowdsourcing and went through the whole process as a courier.

To Join, You First Have to Pass Training

Before taking any orders, every participant must attend an in-person JD Daojia training session. I used a WeChat booking page to sign up for the session on the afternoon of May 20.

At 2 p.m., the other participants and I trickled into JD.com's office at Chaolin Plaza in Daxing District. Staff soon appeared and led us upstairs.

Once everyone had taken a seat in a training room "converted" from a conference hall, we were told to scan a code and install JD's apps. The dedicated JD Crowdsourcing app runs only on phones with Android 4.0 or later, so the few participants with iPhones couldn't try it. Registering and linking accounts came next, and it wasn't easy either. It meant linking several accounts, including online banking and JD Wallet, and some participants kept getting stuck. The whole step took more than 40 minutes, about half the training time.

Luckily, only 20 participants showed up that day. Apart from a woman in her thirties and one older man, all were young or middle-aged men, mostly college students and people with jobs and flexible hours. No square-dancing aunties appeared. The two trainers on site could just about cope. If JD Daojia's public claim of more than 2,000 sign-ups is true, the earlier sessions must have been a heavy load.

Curious, I asked a JD Daojia staff member about it. According to him, those 2,000-plus people were in fact mostly JD employees and full-time couriers. And during my deliveries the next day, I saw that staff at supermarkets working with JD Daojia also had the order-grabbing app on their phones.

When most people had finished registering and linking their accounts, the training began. JD Crowdsourcing is close to what outsiders would call "part-time couriers." The idea is that JD's mobile app offers piecemeal delivery jobs to people with time on their hands and pays them when the jobs are done. So the training mostly explained the JD Crowdsourcing process by walking through the app.

What everyone really cared about, though, was the pay per order and the requirements for participants. The trainers said a crowdsourced courier earns 6 yuan per order, 1 yuan more than a full-time courier. Since crowdsourced couriers get no base salary and must supply their own transport, the job closely resembles driving for Uber or for Didi's premium car service.

JD Daojia's measures against fake orders, as explained to us, seemed somewhat harsh. To stop couriers from grabbing orders they placed themselves and then refusing delivery to pocket the fee, a crowdsourced courier gets no delivery fee if the buyer refuses the goods. Worse, if the merchant also won't take the goods back, the courier has to pay for them. JD Daojia staff said this rarely happens, and that if it does, you only need to call customer service within an hour (after that, you bear the consequences yourself).

What if you don't refuse delivery and just want to collect one delivery fee? Another JD employee told us some full-time couriers had tried placing fake orders. But orders are posted publicly, and anyone nearby using the app can see them, so whoever grabs an order may not be the person who placed it. JD has no penalty for fake orders, but by the sound of it, pulling one off takes quick eyes and quick hands.

The training itself was easy, mostly a matter of watching instructional videos. The test was easier still: 20 multiple-choice questions, mainly on delivery rules and procedures. Since nobody watched us closely, people discussed any question they weren't sure of and easily scored 100 (70 is a pass). Registering our details afterward was simple too: you fill in your basic personal information and how much you can deliver on a web page, and hand in a photocopy of your ID card.

JD Daojia sets only one real barrier. A crowdsourced courier must pay a 300-yuan deposit online, which stays frozen in his or her JD Crowdsourcing account. On top of that, the courier must load JD Wallet with a guarantee equal to the price of the goods he or she will deliver.

Each time a courier picks up goods, JD Daojia freezes an amount equal to their value. That way, when a buyer pays cash on delivery and hands the money to the crowdsourced courier, JD can still settle with the merchant out of the frozen funds if anything goes wrong. Nor does the courier have to reconcile each day's cash with the merchant, order by order.

In other words, if I ever wanted to deliver something like an iPhone 6, I would have to deposit several thousand yuan in the app as collateral, matching the merchant's price. For now, of course, JD Daojia mostly handles food and household goods and doesn't deliver valuables. Since I planned to take only a few fresh-produce and takeout orders, I put in 100 yuan.

When it was all over, I asked for a detailed written manual. The trainers said they couldn't provide one yet. When problems come up, we can only call customer service or read a crude web guide inside the app. That guide says nothing about JD's responsibilities and obligations or about penalties for couriers who break the rules, let alone spell out any contract terms.

On the evening I passed the test, I was notified that my JD Daojia account had been activated and I could now see delivery jobs in the JD Crowdsourcing app. Merchants stop taking orders by 7 or 8 p.m., so I decided to try again early the next morning.

An App That Tries to Make Crowdsourced Delivery Work

The app sits at the center of the whole delivery process. What makes it different?

First, it is the only way crowdsourced couriers get orders. Using my phone's location, it lists every order awaiting delivery from any JD Daojia merchant within 5 kilometers under "Grab an Order." Much like Didi drivers grabbing rides on their phones, couriers pick orders by weighing the time left against the distance. JD Daojia's rules say every order must reach the buyer within 120 minutes; if it arrives late, the courier gets no delivery fee.

One awkward problem is that the open orders appear in no discernible order, and there is no button to sort them by pickup and delivery distance or by time remaining. So I had to keep scrolling and work out the route for each order, one by one, before deciding which to grab. If you don't know the streets well and want to deliver several items in one trip, finding suitable orders is tiring and slow.

Some reports say JD Crowdsourcing lets you "pick up deliveries on your way and earn money with ease." Having tried it, I think that is genuinely hard to do. JD Crowdsourcing is still at an early stage; before it can assign orders intelligently as Uber does, it will probably need to collect a lot more data.

If you grab the wrong order by mistake, or decide an order doesn't suit you, you can back out: just tap "Cancel Order" within 5 minutes.

Second, once you've grabbed an order, you also use the app to pick it up. Only the person who grabbed the order can scan the barcode on the receipt at the merchant, show the result on the spot and collect the goods. Anyone who hasn't scanned may not take goods from the merchant. This ensures each order has exactly one courier and prevents mix-ups when merchants hand over goods.

The app does offer navigation once you've grabbed an order, but the feature has been badly stripped down. The so-called navigation just marks the courier, the merchant and the buyer on a Tencent map. Dragging and zooming the map is a struggle, much of the detail disappears when you zoom in, and it can't give you a route at all.

If you want to be an efficient JD courier, you're better off typing the addresses into Baidu Maps or Amap yourself.

Finally, after the buyer signs for the goods, I tap the "Delivered" button on each order's detail page to mark it complete. That doesn't mean I get my delivery fee right away.

JD Daojia pays crowdsourced couriers on a T+2 basis: a day's earnings reach the courier's JD Wallet two days later. But this system won't start until June, so anything earned before then will only be paid in June.

JD Daojia has also built a referral feature into the app. Current crowdsourced couriers can share a personal sign-up page or code to invite friends to join, and take a cut.

But don't expect an Uber-style bonus of tens of yuan per ride. Invitees still have to go to a training site and pass the training and test. And for each order an invitee completes, the inviter earns just 0.1 yuan, capped at 30 yuan.

The First Order I Couldn't Grab

A little after eight the next morning, I opened the app to see whether there were suitable jobs nearby and got ready to grab one. Strangely, the app listed only one delivery order. It put me 4.3 kilometers from the merchant, and the merchant a full 14.4 kilometers from the customer. That's 18.3 kilometers in all!

For an order that far, the delivery time remaining showed 0 minutes. Clearly, nobody could complete it.

After a while, the order vanished from the screen. When I called JD staff, they said that if no crowdsourced courier grabs an order, a full-time courier takes it over in the last 30 minutes, so it is still delivered within 2 hours. As for the order I had seen, the staff member simply advised me not to grab problem orders like that, without explaining why. Orders like it kept turning up in my list afterward.

Making Deliveries

Order 1

Orders didn't start appearing in large numbers until after 9 a.m. Most of the merchants listed were far from me; only this CP Lotus supermarket on Chaoyang Road was close, 2.1 kilometers away.

When I got to the supermarket, I didn't know the place, and JD gave no directions, so I had no idea where to collect the goods. I called the store's staff, and the woman I spoke to said that since I was from JD, I should report to JD myself. She had taken me for a new JD employee.

After wandering around, I finally found JD's manager at the store. To my surprise, he hadn't heard of crowdsourced couriers either. After stepping aside to make a phone call, he at last let me scan the order's QR code and handed me a bag of cherry tomatoes to deliver.

My instinct was to check their freshness, as the rules require, but these promotional items had already been packed and sealed, so I gave up. JD Daojia also says goods that need special storage, such as fresh fruit, should go in the insulated boxes it provides. I hadn't received one yet, so I carried the tomatoes in my hand.

Behind me, the manager laughed and said to the couriers: "If you don't grab orders fast, other people will take them all from now on!"

I later learned that before the crowdsourcing model, couriers were assigned orders by area. Crowdsourcing was new to JD's delivery staff too.

After some trouble, asking for directions and checking several map apps along the way, I finally reached Shilibao Beili, 2.1 kilometers away. Then making change stumped me. I had brought small notes, but I still couldn't break a 50-yuan note for a 1-yuan order. The order had been placed by the elderly man's children, and he didn't know how to pay by phone, so I had to wait while he found change somewhere else.

This one order had already cost me nearly 2 hours. Worse, only after I left did I notice that while the app showed 1 yuan due, the receipt said 0 yuan to collect. The two didn't match.

I called JD Crowdsourcing's 400 customer-service hotline, but it was busy for a long time. When I got through, I learned the buyer had already paid the 1 yuan online, so I shouldn't have collected it. I went back and returned the money.

Order 2

I picked the CP Lotus store in Shifoying, just 600 meters away. When I got there, the JD delivery person assigned to the store said the goods had already been collected, by one of the supermarket's own employees.

It turned out she was simply dropping the items off for someone she knew on her way. Nothing went wrong with the order in the end. But it made me curious that someone who wasn't the order's courier could walk off with the goods. Whether the fault lay with the supermarket or with JD Daojia, I couldn't find out.

Still, it saved me a lot of legwork.

Order 3

After lunch I went back to the QDaily office. While scrolling for my next job, I tapped the grab button by accident, on an order with only 70 minutes left. Luckily it was only 1.7 kilometers away, so I didn't cancel it and headed to Xingfu Supermarket in Yong'an Li.

Directed by store staff, I eventually found the work area the supermarket had set aside for JD Daojia. In a small stairwell, five staff were sorting a large batch of goods about to go out. When they heard I was a crowdsourced courier, they weren't the least bit surprised. "We've had 'part-timers' come and do it (as couriers) before," one of them told me. "Don't you know you're supposed to call the merchant before you come?" He seemed a little annoyed, because I had upset their sorting system.

To deliver more efficiently, the couriers lay out goods for different areas in separate piles. Crowdsourced couriers upset that arrangement. The couriers at the two earlier supermarkets had also said they didn't know how some orders had gone "missing." Among parcels that should have been packed and sent out together on one route, one or two orders would mysteriously appear that they couldn't enter in the system or collect. The full-time couriers found this very frustrating.

I took the goods and finished my third order. The buyer signed for it and asked with a smile: "How come it's not the usual courier this time?"

Order 4

On a JD courier's tip, I grabbed five orders in a row, all for a company in the building below QDaily's office. But I ran into trouble at pickup. The supermarket manager who dealt with JD hadn't heard of crowdsourced delivery either, so he first called JD Daojia's customer service to check.

Even after they confirmed it, the manager still wasn't satisfied. He dug out the store's dispatch slips and made me sign each one. He said this "part-time" model makes delivery riskier and adds to his workload. The process took about half an hour, and it isn't needed at all with full-time couriers.

Since the training had required crowdsourced couriers to cooperate with merchants in proving who they are, I had no choice but to sign every slip. By then, less than half an hour of delivery time was left.

The courier behind me was very curious about crowdsourced delivery and kept asking how much I made per order and how to join. He perked up when he heard I earned 1 yuan more per order, but once he learned there was no base salary, he dropped the idea of becoming a crowdsourced courier on the spot.

After four delivery runs, with no transport of my own, I had spent 4.5 hours to complete just 8 orders and earn only 48 yuan. The route totaled 11 kilometers, and I covered part of it by Uber.

Compared with Airbnb and Uber, crowdsourced delivery is far easier to get into. You could even say anyone can join. But if people are to take part without subsidies, the couriers have to be able to make money. And to make money at this, you basically need a bike. For the office workers on their lunch break whom JD hopes to recruit, let alone the square-dancing aunties, that's a real hassle.

Besides, nearly everything I delivered was fruit and vegetables from a "1-yuan flash sale." Shoppers paid just 1 yuan for goods normally worth about 5 yuan, with free delivery. Clearly, JD Daojia also pays for the crowdsourced couriers' deliveries. Like ride-hailing and food-delivery apps, JD Daojia seems to be trying to build user habits by selling at a loss.

At the training, staff claimed JD Daojia handles as many as 3,000 orders a day. If the cash-burning subsidies stop one day, will shoppers keep buying on the platform?

Cover image from: Hellorf Creative