Job request confirmation by courier

Q&A
1

Hi All,
I noticed going into production, that if I send a POST /v2/jobs with pickup_at too close to current time and date the selected courier is not alerted by the incoming job request by her/his app, and she/he is not either able to accept or refuse the delivery. The delivery request goes automatically into accepted without the courier confirmation. This cause the courier not to see the request immediately, to move to pickup late or even to miss the delivery.
Did you have chance to observe this behavior?
Is there a way to solve this?

I just added a control to postpone the pickup if this is too close to current time.
Thanks for your advice,
Phil

2

Hi Phil,

Many thanks for highlighting this case to us and explaining the behaviour you’re seeing in detail, much appreciated.

Do you have any example order IDs where you saw this behaviour? We will investigate and advise if this is indeed what is happening or if there is something else related causing this.

James

3

Hi James,

thank you for you quick response

this is
Delivery #125302116
Actually I sent POST /jobs at 19:44:44 with pickup at 19:52:02 through an integrated system. The restaurant saw the approaching courier on the map but then the courier didn’t stop and passed along.
2021-01-24T19:44:44.484+01:00

body :
{
“job”: {
“pickups”: [
{
omitted …
}
],
“assignment_code”: “ACC86qwe”,
“pickup_at”: “2021-01-24T18:53:02.000000Z”,
“dropoffs”: [
{
“client_reference”: “urn:uuid:fdb0fb5a-5e73-11eb-ad2d-1af0847c15ef”,
omitted …
}
}
]
}
}

Therefore the restaurant sent a manual order Delivery #125307285 and when the courier arrived , he told the restaurant he just received the order as already “confirmed” without his manual approval. Therefore a few minutes passed before he was moving to the restaurant for pickup and was almost missing the delivery appointment.

Therefore I suppose the first courier didn’t see at all the delivery request that went into “confirmed” without his approval and furthermore caused a charge to the restaurant account.

Could you please confirm this is the case?
I now changed the POST job logic checking that pickup at is no closer than 16 minutes.

Thank you very much for your support,
Phil

4

Hi there any update about this topic?

5

Hi Phil,

Update on this: To give you some background, it is very common for drivers to have an “auto-accept” feature turned on - so they do indeed accept jobs that do not require manual confirmation and this is expected.

What’s happened for this job is the driver had their auto-accept enabled seemingly without their knowledge. As you can imagine, typically when the driver does have auto-accept enabled they would take extra measures to ensure they are always aware of incoming jobs.

As for the cause it’s down to whether this is simply a case of an individual driver mistakenly having the wrong setting enabled or whether there’s a consistent pattern of mistakenly auto-accepted invites in the platform (and furthermore if it is just for this one account or not)

I’m currently still verifying if we believe this is a one-off case or whether there is a pattern to this behaviour we can spot - will update you as soon as I know more.

Many Thanks,
James