Slightly better pay, but the navigation is way off
When I first started doing delivery work, I downloaded both Meituan Crowdsourcing and Dada Now Rider at the same time. Dada had been acquired by JD.com two months earlier. After a few weeks on Meituan and getting past the rookie stage, I figured it was time to give Dada a try.
People online had been saying Dada's positioning was inaccurate. I brushed it off, then hit it on my very first order. It really is inaccurate.
I was about 200 meters away from the destination, and I had to call the customer twice before I finally found the place. That directly caused my second order, which I was already carrying, to run late. Luckily, I could cover it with a newbie exemption card and avoid the penalty.
How do you keep bad positioning from messing things up?
Don't use the map shortcut inside the Dada app. If the coordinates are wrong there, they'll be wrong no matter where they show up. Open Amap directly, type in the destination by hand, and start navigation from there.
As for pay, Dada generally feels like it pays one or two yuan more per order than Meituan Crowdsourcing. But that doesn't mean you can grab everything blindly. If an order is sitting on the square and nobody wants it, and the average is under 1 yuan per kilometer, don't touch it. That's pure grunt work.
For me, orders averaging over 2 yuan per kilometer are already decent. When both pickup and drop-off are only a few hundred meters away, orders above 3 yuan per kilometer are actually hard to get.
Dada also has a recent promotion: complete one qualifying order and you get a 15 yuan reward. I managed to take advantage of that too.
Back to the deliveries themselves: on my very first day with Dada, I ended up taking two orders that made me genuinely happy. One was to the residential compound where I live now, and the other was to an apartment in an urban village where I lived years ago. Neither one needed navigation.
More women riders seem to be out there
Lately, I've had the feeling that there are more women riders around. I keep seeing them while buying groceries from delivery platforms, on the way to the subway for work, and even in the elevators at shopping malls. It's obviously more than it was a couple of years ago. I wasn't sure whether any rider data could back up that feeling.
2025-07-24 update
I did find a Meituan rider report: the "Meituan Rider Annual Career Report (2024-2025)" on https://www.meituan.com/newsroom/rider-protection.
(2) Gender characteristics: men account for more than 90%, and "couple teams" are relatively stable
From 2022 to 2024, male riders consistently made up more than 90% of monthly active riders on the platform. Although female riders accounted for less than 10%, their numbers kept rising: the number of female riders earning income on Meituan grew from 517,000 in 2022 to 701,000 in 2024. Field research shows that female riders are mostly married middle-aged women. In many cases, the career choice is influenced by a spouse: the husband becomes a rider first, and later the wife joins to form a "couple team." Because the sample size is limited, the overall share of couple teams is hard to measure, but the samples already show that these teams are more stable in employment, and the women in them are slightly more stable than the men. In the survey, many couple teams had worked as riders for more than three years, and in each pair at least one person had been promoted to a team leader, station manager, or a similar role. Outside of couple teams, the reasons women choose rider work are no different from men's: high income and flexibility are the main draw.
The report does show that the number of female riders has gone up, but their share of the total hasn't really increased.
Besides the "information disclosure" section, Meituan's "public welfare" section is also quite well done. When donating to the public welfare playground project, you can choose your hometown and see the kindergarten currently raising funds. After the project is completed, you can even find out exactly which row and column in which playground received each donated floor tile.