Uber Eats tip baiting is one of the more frustrating parts of delivering for Uber Eats, and if you deliver for Uber Eats regularly, it’s something you will likely have to deal with at some point. Indeed, you’ll find countless threads online of drivers complaining about tip baiting.
So what exactly is tip baiting? In short, it’s when the customer changes their tip after the driver has delivered the order. The reason this can happen is that Uber Eats allows customers to change their tip up to one hour after their delivery is completed.
In this post, we’ll take a closer look at what Uber Eats tip baiting is and discuss why it might happen and what you can do to prevent it from happening to you.
What Is Uber Eats Tip Baiting?
Tip baiting is when a customer leaves a tip with the intent of enticing a driver to accept their order, then removes the tip after the order is delivered. By doing this, the customer gets their order delivered to them quickly and saves money by not tipping.
Uber Eats drivers are paid per delivery, so the decision to accept an order is based on the expected payout from Uber Eats. While Uber Eats drivers can’t see exactly what a customer tipped when accepting an order, they can get a sense of what the customer tipped by the expected payout. A low expected payout likely means the customer left no tip, while a high expected payout means the customer likely left a good tip. As a result, drivers are more likely to quickly accept orders from customers that left good tips.
The reason tip baiting works is that Uber Eats allows customers to remove their tip for up to one hour after the order is delivered. Customers do not have to give a reason for removing or lowering a tip. They can simply do so within the Uber Eats app and the driver won’t know until an hour or so after the order is completed. As a drive, you’ll only know the tip was changed or removed by looking at the earnings screen.
There are some circumstances when a customer might have a legitimate reason to change or remove the tip. If a driver is rude to a customer, for example, it can make sense for a customer to punish the driver by removing the tip. Or if a driver is obviously multi-apping and taking strange routes that lead to long delays, it can make sense to punish the driver and remove the tip.
But most of the time, a customer changing a tip after delivery is simply tip baiting. Either that or they are blaming the driver for things outside of their control, such as missing or incorrect orders, or long delays because the restaurant was slow or busy.
Tip Baiting Doesn’t Exist With DoorDash Or Grubhub
Unlike Uber Eats, DoorDash and Grubhub both do not allow customers to change their tips after the order is completed. As a result, the payout you see as a driver is the payout you will receive.
This is in contrast to Uber Eats, which doesn’t show drivers the actual payout, but rather the “anticipated” payout.
There are other apps that can also suffer from this tip-baiting issue. Instacart, in particular, is another app that allows customers to change their tip after the delivery is completed. However, after some media coverage about this issue, Instacart did make it clear that they would deactivate customers that consistently tip-baited shoppers. Uber, on the other hand, has never addressed tip baiting.
What Can You Do About Tip Baiting?
Unfortunately, there’s not much you can do about tip-baiting as a driver. One thing I can say is that the vast majority of orders will pay exactly what is expected. I’ve only been tip-baited a handful of times in the 6+ years I’ve been delivering for Uber Eats. In my experience, probably 95% of orders will pay exactly as expected.
If you see a particularly high-paying order, I would still accept it (assuming it makes sense for you – i.e. it’s going in the right direction, the distance is correct, etc). While very high-paying orders could be potential tip-bait orders, it’s not worth second-guessing yourself and rejecting those orders under the assumption that it could be a tip-bait.
The only other things you can do is provide good customer service, deliver orders on time, and do your best to make sure orders are accurate. Most of the time, if your tip is lowered, it’ll be because something happened that the customer is blaming you for. Sometimes, they might be right to blame you. Other times, it might have been something out of your control.
One of the things I notice a lot of drivers forget is the drinks. It’s easy to forget drinks because they’re usually not put in the same bag as the rest of the order. Restaurants often forget about them too, so if all you do is take whatever is handed to you without looking at what the order is, you’ll probably miss the drink. When I’m delivering for Uber Eats, I always double-check the order in my Uber Eats app to make sure I’m not missing a drink.
Final Thoughts
Overall, tip-baiting is a problem, but one that I wouldn’t worry about too often. Yes, it can happen. And yes, it sucks when it happens. But for the most part, when you see the expected payout for an Uber Eats order, you can usually work under the assumption that you will receive that payout. The vast majority of customers are not going to tip-bait drivers.
I hope this post was helpful. Please feel free to leave your thoughts about tip-baiting or share your experiences.
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HI Kevin! Interesting article. I do Uber Eats deliveries on occasion and I donate 100% of the earnings to charity, so it’s a very part-time thing as I have a very good day job. I went out today and was very obviously tip-baited. This was my first bad experience in over 500 deliveries. I know for a fact that raising it to Uber corporate is useless. Truth is that for most drivers, the tip is the vast majority of their income. It isn’t really a tip , Uber has just pushed 75% of the responsibility for paying the drivers on to the customer as the business runs on extremely low or negative margins (in the longer term, I believe both DoorDash and Uber will implode when their primary source of cheap capital, the overinflated stock market, reverts to the mean). I decided to take a slightly different approach. I am filing a small claims suit against the tip-baiter. I am 99% sure that the judge will be sympathetic to my cause but loyal to the driver contract so I will lose, but in this case, I am going to make the tip-baiter “earn” it by dragging her into court and making her look like an idiot. Who knows? She may not show up and I get a default judgement!!
I had a tip baiter today I called Uber customer service an had them place their account on check I rated this customer an gave them a 4 an also mentioned that this customer might be “Tip Baiter”??
So they will be watching there account for a few weeks You as a Uber Eats driver can rate a customer before you swipe to end delivery there’s a button on the screen where you can rate this customer but if the customer might be a Tip Baiter you will have to call Uber an give them the customers name n the restaurant they ordered from an take it from there how you want to rate them an reasons why??
I honestly wonder if it really is the customer who is tip-baiting or Uber themselves, offering a ficticious tip in order to get delivery people to accept the orders. I often (like at least 10 times a day) have orders that promise one fee and then result in a much lower fee at the end of the day. Uber’s lack of transparency frankly strikes me a flagrantly illegal. Their whole business model seems to be built on thumbing their noses at labour laws and ethical business rules.
If delivery people are going to hold off on orders because it’s not worth their time. Then it’s perfectly logical that customers are going to find a way to make them do their jobs. Life finds a way.
If you’re going to withhold an order for a ransom. You can’t cry when customers retaliate by dangle a carrot in front of you to make you do your job.
Seeing this I assume you are also a bait tipper, we are not required to take a order therefore it’s not our job to make sure you get your food. You are paying for a service that one does and should pay accordingly. If you don’t have money then maybe get off your butt get in your car, start it, put it in gear and drive your butt to the store to get your food. Driver’s are not taking low paying orders because it doesn’t let them gain anything. If you get 20mpg and go 10 miles away the round trip is 20 miles so one gallon of gas if you make $3 you made your gas but nothing else. To understand how it is tell your job you will work for free but only require gas paid and see how long you keep that screen your hiding behind.
Obviously coming from a tip baiter you cheap POS. You obviously are a no tipper. If you cant afford to tip go get the food yourself. No wonder you post anonymous only someone guilty of doing it would frown on people not wanting to waste their time delivering to a loser like yourself. You are a “leave at door” person too right ? Too embarrassed to show your cheap ass face .
I’ve been delivering a few times a week for a little over a month and had my first one a couple days ago. Luckily the dropoff was basically across the street from where I live and wasn’t very far, but I had to drive through rush hour traffic. He not only screwed me out of the $6 tip, he screwed anyone else who ever orders from that location. If I see the same delivery location when accepting an order I’ll cancel it without hesitation.
This is complete fraud and I’ve hired an attorney who agrees. I was stiffed by UberEATS tonight on a shop and pay delivery I made to a customer who happens to live down the street from me. I intend to confront him/her about this tomorrow. If there’s even a slight chance that this customer did NOT remove their tip and this is just yet another one of UberEATS screw-upperies. Woe be it unto them. I’m stunned at how many of you shoppers just sort of shrug it off. No wonder UberEATS allows this bait and switch to continue! They need a lawsuit in order for change to occur
It is very annoying!!!!!!!! It’s happened to me a couple of times and when I call customer service, they try to shrug it off! Uber doesn’t care, you’ve done the delivery, whether you get swindled or tip baited by the customer, they don’t care. It’s a terrible terrible company.
Just had me a tip baiter all I can say is thankfully it was close to my home so the $3 I ended up making covered the gas. So much for that $10 tip I kinda figured when I saw it was just a combo meal and a young kid took the order!
Today alone, I was tip baited at least 12 of my 16 runs. One was gracious enough to leave me 0.01. 👍
When I first started delivering with Uber I had no issues with tip baiting. Lately it’s been on the uptick. It may have something to do with the economy. Due to this I’ve been sticking to Doordash lately. FYI my rating is pretty high on Uber and my deliveries are usually on time or early.
That stinks. Sorry to hear about that.
Uber eats is garbage. Out of my first four deliveries only 1 actually left the tip, and I’m not slow or multi apping.
That hasn’t been my experience, though I did just get my first tip baiter today. Of the recommendation of a YouTuber who is a delivery driver, I’m going to follow up with customer service and see if they’ll fix it. Here’s hoping.