Amazon Flex
Reviews and Complaints

My experience in 2 days of driving:
Day 1 of 2: I live in southwest Austin. The Amazon Flex pickup location to which I was assigned is in southeast Austin. There’s an Amazon distribution center is in San Marcos TX, 30 min down I-35. So I was surprised my assigned route took me 30 minutes south of San Marcos, 54 miles from Austin, to far south Luling in Gonzales County. Map that! I had to drive down 7+ miles of dirt roads, some of which were almost washed out, for my 2017 Civic. Had to drive max 19mph to minimize gravel road rock damage to my paint. Now I understand why UPS and FedEx use large trucks with large tires. It ended up being over 4 hours of driving, not just the assigned 3 hours, to complete the route and get back home, for $54, -$7 for gas, and no telling what kind of wear and tear on my tires and paint damage to my new-ish Civic. Surely they can see what vehicle I have and could assign routes based on suitability of your vehicle. So I calculated this first day net me $13/hr *plus104 miles of back country + dirt road driving. I could flip burgers or stock shelves with no wear and tear on my vehicle for $13/hr. Also, you have to guess what their coded territories mean as far as routes go. Am I supposed to intuitively know what ‘DAU1’ and ‘DAU2’ mean or where that is? At least now I know that DAU2 includes dirt roads.
Day 2 of 2: I’ll try this again, I thought to myself. I kept checking all day, and finally saw a 5:15pm-8:15pm route for DAU1 (surely that’s the north side of Austin, which I know), and I swiped right and selected it. It was 2:45pm, and I had some time. So I swipe the upper-right button to turn on the ‘available now - accept nearby orders’ button. It was the Central Austin Whole Foods and I was a block away. Bingo, I thought. Well, it looks like I lost my 5:15 pickup order for north Austin, based on the itinery. I get inside Whole Foods Central Austin (this might be their HQ), and it’s March 25, the beginning of Social Distancing for COVID-19, and all these people are on top of each other in and out of a small room of shelves (gym locker rooms are bigger) and a row of coolers and a walk-in cooler. None of the orders I’m supposed to find are together; one person’s order was in 3 different coolers and several different shelf racks. A Whole Foods person asked if he could help me when I said I was with Amazon Flex, and he said said, ‘Oh sorry, none of us really have experience on your side.’ Well that explains why all these Whole Foods people are just standing around watching. Another lady I approached and asked the layout of everything said, ‘I think this is over here but I’m not 100%.’ Okay, well, it’s 3:15 and I have one cooler-bag scanned by when I get a pop-up from the Amazon Flex app: ‘You have a pickup in 2 hours.’ Oh crap! I haven’t even 2 bags of the 20 I’m supposed to scan in the 20 minutes I’ve been there, and it says I have until 6 to deliver the Whole Foods orders but I have to get to the north Austin non-food warehouse by 5:15. So I call Amazon Driver Support, and get a helpful lady on the phone and day I’d rather keep the 5:15 warehouse pick-up and I’ve put back the one item I scanned at Whole Foods. She asks me for some numbers to identify the order, which I provide, and it takes a couple of minutes, but she removes the Whole Foods order. She has me refresh my Itinerary in the Amazon Flex app, and after a couple of refreshes, the Whole Foods order is gone. But wait, so is my 5:15 north Austin warehouse pickup. What happened? The friendly Driver Support rep apologizes, but doesn’t know. So, apparently, if there’s an Immediate order that overlaps a standing-but-later warehouse order, selecting the immediate order dropped the later order, but not its reminder notification. And there was no warning in the 30-second window I was allotted by the app to select or reject the Immediate order, that selecting the Immediate order would drop my Existing-albeit-later order, nor was there any indication in that Immediate order’s 30-second window to select or reject it to tell me how much time I was committing to. Frustrating. So I thought I was being shrewd and effective in picking up two orders, the earlier for ~$30 and the later for $54, but instead, I’m out both. Not cool. Fair warning. Developers, please rectify all of this immediately or at least provide Amazon Flex drivers some training on this.

Among the many glitches, freezes and crashes, the maps system needs a complete overhaul. This is by far, one of the worst and most unreliable apps I have ever used. Load times are ridiculous as well.

Maps needs an overhaul:
Maps will send you to a pin that’s not on the road the pin is on, sometimes the pin is incorrect as well, sometimes the whole address is wrong. I’ve had to pull out my own mapping system on occasion to find the address.
The new highlight feature is cool and all but it’s also unreliable…it’s come in very handy for nighttime driving but oftentimes the highlighted house will not be the correct house. Also the highlight feature should highlight the house you’re next to all the time so you can better gauge how close you’re getting to the target house, this would help a lot as some customers block their address number or when it’s dark and harder to read numbers.

Freezes: Flex will often freeze, and sometimes the only way to fix it is to completely restart the app, and then when you do that, it takes forever for it to load back up, sometimes not even doing that and you need to restart the entire phone to get it to work.

Glitches: I go on break or lunch, plug in the phone to power so it can charge…time on break and/or lunch goes crazy…annoying
The itinerary will be out of order and sometimes while scrolling it’ll jump you back to the beginning.

Amazon is a multi-billion dollar company, and this is the app they make their drivers use

Drove around half the day just to be told I received no earnings. Contacted customer support they stated they will get back to me via email in 24-48 hours. It will not let me add my bank account (I have associated credit union) or my debit card when it specifically says all other debit cards will get a fee I have been told by customer support I must purchase an Amazon flex card. None of this is told to you before you start delivering for them I’m pregnant and could have done without this ridiculous headache. Not to mention I picked up in norcross and had to drive over 30 miles away to even deliver the packages. Complete waste of my time and the pay is crap. I will stick to delivery for Uber and Instacart because this is beyond a headache and the app doesn’t speak it just sends you notifications like you are supposed to just read while you are driving. I ended up using my Waze to get to the deliveries because the app kept messing up and taking me to wrong locations and around in circles. I don’t expect to get paid from this and frankly I am fed up with calling customer service and dealing with the error codes on the app. Amazon is too large of a company to have these types of problems. Not to mention they give out Amazon vests for free with no accountability so literally anyone can take one and act as though they work for Amazon. Definitely a safety concern and I do not want to be involved. Back to Uber I go….. this is definitely slavery because I worked over half a day and didn’t receive a dime for it.

Pros:
1) the money is quick. You get paid twice a week
2)You can bring someone with you as long as they don't get in the way and do not get out of the car. (This was the only way I felt safe in some of the areas so I'm very grateful for this)

Cons:
1) The communication between Amazon and Amazon Flex is not good at all. Amazon doesn't know much about Amazon Flex so you have to KEEP CALLING support or email them.

2) There should be a grace period for new employees to get the hang of the process before it starts counting against you.

3) if you are given 48 packages in the middle of 5 o clock traffic and it's raining, how is it possible to SAFELY deliver the packages in 3.5 hrs? (What you do not complete in that time frame will be counted against you btw)

4) you will not get paid for the extra time it takes to complete your packages. If you call support, they'll say to call them when you're done and they'll put in a request but it's not a guarantee that you'll get paid. (I've called but never got paid for the extra time).

5) getting jobs is not the easiest and everyone do not get the same opportunities.

6) there are glitches in the app that should be addressed.I've had to call and email support MULTIPLE times to get help clearing a package off my screen that was returned to the station DAYS ago. I didn't receive any job opportunities those days and I'm sure it's because of that.

7) My first 2 days could have been MUCH better if we would have been provided a flash light or at least told ahead of time that one was necessary.

8) Being able to see that your route is two cities away AHEAD of time would be awesome.

All in all, this is a good side job. I would recommend it to someone who need extra income here n there.

Someone hacked my account I believe because I got notified by email that someone was attempting to login when I went to the app you're stupid two-step verification probably sent a verification code to these people because it had my old phone number. I was trying to reset the password and your app would not let me into my own account (which I thought I requested deactivation for...nobody should be able to get into something that's deactivated by me or Amazon). If I use my email to put in the code that you guys gave me that should be good enough! Now you guys sent a darn code to my old phone number for all I know that hacker might get access to my account personal information! Whoever invented two-step verification is horrible ! You people think that we're gonna keep the same number for the rest of our lives. What if we don't want to be contacted by certain people? Stop forcing people to be glued to their phones and their phone numbers! Also how dare you easily get access into my account app notifying me someone signed into my account but then when I try to get access into my account you put stars over the number and email. So apparently somebody with my old number was able to hack the account with just a phone number possibly but when I tried to access it through my email yall sent a code to that phone number as well. Thats dumb. I might lose my identity because you are not on top of things when it comes to protecting data none of you should have the right to personal information if you can't guarantee it's protection there should be another way to identify people without personal information being exposed! You better delete that account for good to make it where nobody to log into it again or I'm gonna take my rage and anger out on your company!

I work for Amazon as a driver and the Flex’s GPS for delivering packages is horrific. It’s so outdated. Most GPS apps show you stop signs and traffic lights now these days, even the free ones like google maps and Waze, but not this. Amazons a billion dollar company and they can’t design a decent GPS system for their drivers? Not only that, the GPS constantly flips me around, not knowing which direction I’m going, the houses and apartments are constantly marked wrong especially for apartments, the speed limit indicators are wrong a lot, the GPS can’t tell whether I’ve gotten to the house unless I’m a few feet away, and the guidance will try taking me some long way around when all I have to do is take the next turn and I’m there. I’ve sent in complaint after complaint into the feedback section, but Amazon obviously doesn’t care to much about their drivers since there’s never any update that’s changed the GPS what so ever since the time I have been working as a driver. If Amazon really cares about their customers, they’ll update this garbage to a somewhat decent GPS app so us drivers can get the packages to the customers better, or they won’t because they just don’t care and only act like they do.

*UPDATETheir latest update fixed the bug where the picture you take for customers packages was finally shown in a wide shot to you..THATS WHAT YOU FIXED? I’ve sent in complaint after complaint about the gps being terrible for months now and you’ve done nothing to change the gps. You obviously aren’t listening to what the drivers need most, and that’s a reliable gps. Amazon, the billion dollar company, and they fixed the camera bug. Congratulations. You fixed an insignificant bug that was hardly a problem, but leave giant major issues for the drivers to keep dealing with.

I don’t like saying bad things about people or a company in general but when I feel like something needs to be voiced , I do address it accordingly. That being said , Amazon was great on paying me and getting me checked in to receive my packages for the first few blocks I accepted. After the third one , I noticed I was having trouble getting my payments . Apparently , there was a “bank issue” on my account which needed to be verified. I found out later that that was NOT the case. I had to wait 13 days for my payments on two different blocks , not to mention extra time because the blocks went over time scheduled due to route mess-up’s and bad locations , safety issues I occurred along the way . I do feel like they should at least let you pick between a couple different routes before you leave the warehouse so you can have a “fair” run ! A lot of people go to do blocks and they are obviously “all the time” drivers but they get to pick their routes or the warehouse guys that check in are just giving the best routes away without thinking about the ones who have struggled to get there first . I think it should be more fair … and you should at least know what exact location you would be in . That alone would keep me wanting to do more deliveries ! I also think issues should be able to be resolved over the phone as well as by email due to the fact that many of us have kids and we don’t have time to sit down and type an email explaining why we recieved so many issues. Other than that , I think that we all work very hard for amazon and being that amazon is A MULTIBILLION DOLLAR COMPANY … they do need to boost the payments up a little bit more ! We do need to make sure our cars are working properly … maintenance when needed and things like that ! That all takes money to do! Gas prices are not cheap anymore ! So, not too shabby other than all that ! ❤️ God bless!