What does the Uber tipping option look like?

Lately, I’ve been doing a lot of research to find the best Youtube content to help give you guys a fresh perspective from other smart drivers. Aaron, from Your Personal Driver, is putting out some great videos, so I thought I’d share one of his more recent videos about the new uber tipping option.

Take a look at Aaron’s video, then read the transcript below if you prefer to read. If you like the video, make sure to like it and subscribe to Aaron’s channel.

All about the Uber tipping option from the driver’s perspective

Hey, it’s Aaron, Your Personal Driver. Today we’re going to be talking about the new tipping option that Uber is going to be rolling out over the next 180 days. I’m going to show you what it looks like in the actual app. I’m going to tell you how it’s going to affect you, and then I’m going to have just a broad discussion on tipping in general.

As of right now, Uber is going to be rolling out its new tipping feature, among a bunch of other things that they’re going to do to help improve the drivers’ lives and the driver’s relationship with Uber. Now currently, tipping is only available in three cities, and I live in one of those cities. I live in Seattle, Washington, so I’ll be able to show you what tipping looks like in the actual app, how you know if you got tipped, all those kind of fun things, because I have had tipping here for about two weeks.

It’s been pretty awesome, and I’m pretty excited about it. Then I’ll show you about it, then I’ll talk largely about how it’s going to affect you more as a driver. Also if you’re new, feel free to subscribe, so you can get updates when I do my livestreams on Fridays and Saturdays and when I upload a new helpful video every Monday. Okay, guys, the first thing I’m going to do is I’m going to pop out my cell phone here next to me, and we’re going to go on a little bit of an adventure. I’m going to show you what it looks like in the actual app.

What tips look like in your earnings report

Here are my earnings from last week. You can see I worked Friday, Saturday, and Sunday. Saturday I did not work in Seattle, so there is no tipping option available in Olympia, Washington, where I was working. As you can see here, I made $16 in tips, and I had an Instant Pay of $2, because I’m an addict of Instant Pay, but let’s just ignore that for this video. Let’s go on and look and see what I did on Friday.

When you go in here, it will tell you the earnings here at the top, the tips here in the middle, and then how many hours you drove, how many trips you completed. As you scroll down, you’ll notice there’ll be little icons right here that say how much money the trip was plus the tipping amount. If you click on that, it will say tip with a little green checkmark on it, so you know that that specific trip you did get tipped. If you scroll down, it will tell you exactly how much you tipped.

You can earn tips a high percentage of the time

As you can see, I got tipped five times, and that is addition to cash. I think it was $37 in cash, so $47. I’ll do the math here, but $47 from 239 is pretty good. Also if you look at my total trips, so that’s almost $2 additional a trip that I’m getting through tipping here in Seattle, so that’s nice. All that came from the app. Then on Sunday, I earned $6 on 14 trips, so that’s really good. That’s almost every other trip tipped me. Here you go, showing all the different kind of tips. Oh, and did you see on Sunday I made $6 in tips on 14 trips? Also, I made cash. I need to start keeping better track of my cash tips. I don’t know exactly how much I made in cash.

Okay, now let’s look at yesterday. Last night I did 17 trips. I got $5 in tips and I did $205 in daily earnings. I also made $28 in cash. I did count that last night. As you can see I had one tip that day, $5 at the very beginning.

How tipping works for customers

I’m going to talk about how the actual tipping works in the actual app for the customer. In order for a passenger to tip you, they have to rate you first. To give you an idea of what that looks like, last week I drove 43 trips, and I only got rates 21 times.

Right off the bat, half the people I gave rides to never got the option to tip me in the app because they didn’t rate me. Only 21 out of 43 people rated me, so only 21 out of 43 people had the option to give me a tip and of that, six gave me a tips, so a little bit more than 25% of people who rate you are tipping me according to the way it has worked the last two weeks. Another example of this, I gave 37 trips and only 13 people, so roughly a third of the people that I gave rides to even rated me. That means only a third of the people even were available to give me a tip, so keep that in mind. That’s something that you got to consider if you’re not getting very many tips is that you’re probably going to have to give a lot more rides, because you’re going to have to compel people to actually give you a rating.

One more thing you have to keep in mind is that if a passenger hasn’t updated their app then they’re not going to be able to tip you, because the tipping feature is something that only happens in updates. If a customer asks if they can tip you in the app, make sure you say two things. One, “Yes, but you have to update your app,” and two, “You have to rate me.” Number one a thing I make them do is rate you. Say, “Yeah, make sure you give me a rating, and then you’ll be able to tip me.” Now that tips are available, what should you do in your business model, and then I’ll say this. If you’re not getting tipped right now on the app, you’re still not going to get tips. It’s not because of Uber making it easier to tip, it’s because your business model isn’t very good.

20-30% of my income comes from tips

One more time I’ll post a video up here about how you get tips. Very often I’ll get 20 to 30% additional income because I’m making that in tips. Until now, it’s only been in cash on Uber, so I’m hoping that over time, once customers get used to this, it will also increase on the in-app tip option, but as of right now, it can’t hurt. That’s what’s fabulous about it. What I’m trying to tell you is you have to make sure that you run your business in a successful way that’s going to compel passengers to think you’re special and go into their pocket and give additional money to you because of how awesome you are. Now for those of you doing Lyft, you’re going to roll your eyes at this video and say, “Yeah, we’ve been having tips for years now.”

Yeah, I would say that when I take Lyfts, that being said, passengers who haven’t used the Lyft app are used to tipping, because they’ve been doing it for a long time. My hope is going forward it will become more of a ritual and more like a norm to tip in the Uber app, so that’s what we can hope for.

The last bit of business advice I can give you is give everyone five stars, because that’s what I do when I drive a Lyft passenger. Everyone gets a five star. You get a five star, you get a five star, you get a five star, you get a five star, everyone gets a five star, because passengers will be able to see their rating. They’ll see it go up or down based upon the rating you give them. If they look at their app and they see their rating goes down, they’re definitely not going to give you a tip. They’re going to get pissed off, give you a low rating, and then not give you a tip.

A tip about ratings

The last little bit of business advice I’m going to give you guys is that you need to rate all of your passengers five stars unless you don’t want to get paired with them again. Uber is no longer a one, two, three, four, or five star option for drivers to give their passengers. On Uber, you have two options. Five stars or one star. Either you would drive this person again or you never want to see them again in your lives. Just keep in mind that passengers can now see their ratings in their app very easily. If their rating goes down, they’re not going to give you a tip. If their rating goes up, they might be a little bit more obliged to do it.

This has been common practice for those of us who have been doing Lyft for years now. Every Lyft passenger is a potential tipper, so you give five stars to every single passenger, and you try to do it as fast as you can, so they can see you give them five stars. Now Uber was different for a long time, because one, passengers couldn’t see their rating very easily, so most of them didn’t know what was going on. Two, there was no in-app tipping, so if they give you cash, you give them five stars. If they don’t give you cash, then you go tell them to go f*** off, and you give them a low rating. You can’t do that anymore. Now everyone who drives Uber’s on a five stars.

That’s just the way it works and going forward. I hope this quick video was helpful for you guys, so you have more information on tipping. Over the next 180 days all of you will also get this feature, so I guess get out there and go make some money guys. Hey, guys, I hope you liked that video. If you did, go ahead and hit like, thumbs up, and go ahead and leave a comment and subscribe. Don’t forget to hit the little bell icon that you have on your YouTube so you can get updates when I leave them. Thanks, guys. Bye.