Building the request
Go to Deliveries → My Deliveries, click Create delivery and pick Request a driver.
The other option, Create a self-managed delivery, sends the route to your own in-house drivers instead.
The delivery request will not save without them:
Pickup location
Pickup date and pickup time
Pickup flexibility, holds two choices.
Time sensitive means only drivers who can make that exact time see the route. It's only available on our support plan.
Flexible arrival widens that time, which puts your route in front of more drivers.
Cargo size, which decides the vehicle
These are optional and worth filling in:
The job description tells a driver what the work involves.
Delivery requirements are tags for the equipment the route needs, like a cooling bag or a dolly.
Declared cargo value insures the route. The amount you declare is the amount you are covered for, and the cost of the cover goes into the price as its own line. Coverage stops at $100, or $5,000 on a paid support plan.
Setting your pickup
Click Pickup location and select a saved location, or type a new one.
For a new location, a form opens. Fill in Location name and Pickup instructions, which is how the driver finds your products, add your Emergency contacts and save.
Emergency contacts are the people on your team a driver reaches about this route, and you pick them from your account users.
To change any of this later, click the pencil on the Pickup location field and the same
form opens.
Adding the drop-offs locations
Go to the 1st drop-off and select a saved delivery stop, or type a new one. You can add or change them after you request a driver, right up until the driver completes a stop on the route.
For a new location, fill in Recipient name, Delivery instructions and at least one way to reach the recipient. Your delivery notifications run on the email and the phone number, so a stop with no phone number gets no text.
The rest of the form is optional:
Address line 2 for what the address alone does not say, like a floor or a unit.
Delivery window: click Add delivery window to set the arrival window for that stop.
Business name: the company at that address, when the recipient is a business rather than a person.
Order ids: click Add order ids to tie the stop to an order in your own system, with the order source and the id.
Sending it to drivers
The main button says Request a driver. That's what makes the route available for drivers. The second button says Save as draft, and it is there for a delivery you are not ready to post yet.
To send a draft out, open the delivery request and click Request a driver in the header.
If your account has no payment method yet, the main button says Create delivery instead, and Metrobi asks for a payment method before the route can go out.
An overdue invoice also stops a request. It can pull a route that was already out back to Not posted, which pulls the driver off it and ends the bidding. Clear the invoice
and send the route out again.
When to post it
There is no cut-off time, but posting early helps: the longer your route is up, the more drivers see it, and the better your odds with the drivers who already work with you.
Route details
With the stops in, click Optimize, next to Add stop. It reorders the drop-offs locations into a shorter route, which cuts the driver's time and your cost.
More options has three checkboxes:
Keep the route optimized automatically re-optimizes the route after you make changes.
Add return stop sends the driver back to the pickup after the last drop-off.
Enforce stop order keeps the stops in the order you set.
Next: editing a delivery request.