What: Citizen Shipper matches consumers who need help moving furniture, pets and other household items with drivers, who are headed in the same direction.
Expected pay: set by you
Husl$core: $$$$
Commissions & fees: $25 per month, after free three-month trial; shippers also pay a fee
Where: Nationwide
Requirements: 21 or over; pass a background check, which includes driving record, references and credit
Review:
Citizen Shipper plays matchmaker between people who need help moving pets or possessions with the drivers willing and able to do it. And, since many jobs involve moving animals, you don’t even need to be a burly guy with a truck to participate.
Shippers say what they need to ship, where, when, and, sometimes, how much they’re willing to pay. Drivers get notified about new jobs in their area and decide whether to bid or accept a proposed job. Citizen Shipper also promotes on-the-way deliveries by creating a stack of up to five other potential deliveries that are between the driver’s current destination and the one that was accepted. Citizen Shipper postulates that drivers can provide more competitive bids — and make more money — by adding deliveries in the stack. This is a nice feature that should work well for both customers and drivers.
Subscription model
Drivers can try the service for free for three months. After that, however, they must pay $25 per month to remain on the site. The site also charges shippers a fee that’s calculated as a percentage of the shipping cost. This fee does not come out of the driver’s pay. It’s an added cost to the consumer.
The site does not charge drivers a commission on the jobs they take, so charging a monthly fee — particularly after a long trial period — seems reasonable. It gives drivers plenty of time to know whether the platform will bring in enough business to make the monthly fee worthwhile.
Our only concern with the site is a gag-clause in their driver agreement. This clause subjects drivers to a $1,000 fine if they “defame” the site’s business integrity or “make damaging statements regarding our business and services.” Gag clauses are usually a bad sign. However, we saw no indication of trouble in this case.
You can find other driving, delivery and moving options that might be of interest at Truxx, Dolly, Amazon Flex and Bellhops.
What their users say: (from an in-person interview)
I’ve only been on the site for a month, but it’s worked out really well so far. We’ve had more than a half-dozen deliveries.
As a driver it stinks they want you to make low bids barely makes your gas and some you don’t make enough gas because bids are so low as well if you break down unless your rich your stuck so why be a driver when it don’t pay what the people should all they think about is cheap but they don’t think of the gas food mileage breakdown also most customers want you to supply whatever bubble wrap carrier the list goes on it should not have to be on the driver these are extra expenses
Too many cheapskates on the site.all people care about is cheap transport. Newsflash all the bad reviews anyone posts starts with cheap rates. Example puppy from FL to tx 1032 miles some idiot bids it at 250.00 dollars do the math .most these shippers haul 3 to 5 dogs at a time that’s not quality care. People say they love their pets but wanna cheap out on shipping. If your gonna ship ask yourself can I afford to do it for the price I’m willing to pay. If not don’t ask someone else who has bills to pay to do it. Know your worth.
Hello Heather, we sincerely appreciate your feedback on using our website. In a lot of cases the lowest bid on a shipment isn’t the one a customer chooses. The shippers rather rely upon driver experience and previous customer reviews. Also, since hundreds of drivers are using the platform every day, there are plenty of them that bid on shipments that are actually their return trips, or they stack multiple loads to increase their rate per mile, and therefore they sometimes do post bids that might seem a bit low from a perspective of someone who’s trying to win that shipment as their primary source of income. Reputation is definitely the best possible leverage a driver using our platform can and should rely upon, so we encourage you to keep on bidding and build your experience. Since we don’t charge any fees from the quotes you provide to the customer, and using our website is free during the first 3 month trial period, we advise anyone that signs up to our platform to use this time period to work on building up their experience and gain a good amount of positive reviews that will help them claim all the economic benefits that come as a result of using CitizenShipper.
We also sincerely appreciate Juan’s insights, and as for the quality of service provided, we welcome anyone who’s skeptical about using our service to book a professional pet transporter to read all the satisfied customer reviews on our social media, driver profiles, TrustPilot and all other platforms people are using to express their satisfaction in the service provided.