Why do you expect that the app won't have such information displayed? The UX isn't hard. It seems pretty trivial to show a bid/ask chart of delivery prices, along with stats like how many drivers are online and how many orders are coming in. You could even use those pieces of information to come up with an estimate for how much you have to bid to get a driver within n minutes.
edit:
I re-read my original comment and realized that it was worded in such a way that implied that I supported the state of affairs that the gp described. To be clear, I'm only advocating for letting the price be determined dynamically.
>If that’s the world we are going to live in then why am I paying a membership fee AND service fees?
I don't see how this is relevant to my proposal. It's already the case today that you can get charged a membership fee (eg. uber one) and get charged delivery/service fees.
As an idea… it might be neat to try at least. But I think you’d have to build the whole service around delivery bidding, there must be abuses in this sort of market, right? As a customer, make 10 accounts and “take” every bid higher than yours, that sort of thing.
I realized that after reading some of the replies. I made various edits accordingly.
>As an idea… it might be neat to try at least. But I think you’d have to build the whole service around delivery bidding, there must be abuses in this sort of market, right? As a customer, make 10 accounts and “take” every bid higher than yours, that sort of thing.
This is probably a non-issue. My impression is that it takes a non-trivial amount of work to get a driver account on such platforms. At the very least you need to give some sort of driver license scan and/or background/SSN check. That alone makes it fairly hard to set up fake accounts to take out competing bids, just so you can save $5 or whatever on your delivery.
I've used them. They don't. You seem to be conflating a description of how things are today with how things could be run instead.
Also as a consumer I have absolutely zero information on how busy drivers are, if my tip needs to be > $X to get picked up faster, if more drivers will login if I tip $X or greater, nor do I have a way to increase my tip if drivers aren’t “biting”.
IF I had that information/ability I’d concede to part of your point but I don’t and even if I did I hate that idea with a fiery passion. If that’s the world we are going to live in then why am I paying a membership fee AND service fees?
I’d say you don’t get to eat your cake and have it too but that’s absolutely what these companies are doing.