Welcome to our Driver Onboarding Guide! The goal for this series of articles is to get you set up as quickly and comfortably as possible, so you can start booking shipments and making money.
Here’s what we’ll be looking at in this first part:
- Setting up your CitizenShipper account
- Editing and organizing your driver profile
- Selecting your shipment categories and routes
If you’re familiar with these topics already, feel free to skip ahead — look for the next onboarding guide (titled Background Screenings, Bidding Strategies) or the one after that (Earnings, Expenses, Experience).
Setting up your CitizenShipper account
This step is pretty simple. Register by clicking any one of the “Become a driver” links we’ve got on the site. Just enter your name, your email, your chosen password, and you’re done!
Next, we’ll send you an email with a link that takes you to the Dashboard — the hub of all your driving operations. This is where you browse shipments, send and receive messages, and bid on shipping jobs.
Looking at your Dashboard, you’ll see several tabs to the left, three big buttons at the top, and a list of shipments in the middle of the screen.
The tabs are filters that you can apply to the shipment list.
— Click “Recommended” to see the shipments that we think you might be interested in.
— Click “Active” to see only the shipments you’re already bidding on.
— Click “Won” to see the shipments you’ve already won.
— Click “All” to see every shipment listed on the site.
The buttons up top are “Home”, “Messages”, and “Routes”. The first takes you back to the Dashboard home screen, the second takes you to the messaging platform, and the third takes you to your current route settings.
Finally, you should also be able to see the search tool in the upper right, and the gear icon in the upper left. The former lets you manually find the shipments you need, while the latter lets you fine-tune your account settings.
That about covers the basics. Click any of the links in the text above or check out the videos for more details. Next, we'll take a look at your profile…
Editing and organizing your driver profile
From the Dashboard, just click your name in the top right area of the screen to access your profile and see how the customers see you.
If you’ve just opened your CitizenShipper account, your profile probably looks kind of bare. Don’t worry, we’re here to change that!
The panel to the left shows your name, your picture, your average star rating, and your cancelation rate.
The panel to the right shows your experience entry, the list of vehicles you’re using, your screening & safety record, and any achievement badges you might have earned.
And between these two are all the reviews left by your satisfied customers! This part of the profile will take some time to build up, so let’s focus on the other two areas first. Click “Edit my profile” and let’s get started.
First off, let’s get that picture sorted. The importance of a good profile photo cannot be overstated. We recommend that you upload a picture showing your face, with plenty of natural light. Do your best to appear positive and professional!
When you click “Add Pictures”, you’ll be prompted to upload pics from your device. You should be able to see all the pictures you’ve uploaded; simply click “Set as profile” to choose which one you want to use as your profile photo.
We also recommend adding other pictures to this gallery — photos of your vehicle, of the pets you’ve been transporting, or the happy owners after you’ve made the delivery. Customers will be able to browse the pics you upload, so make sure they represent your business in the best possible light.
Here's an interactive video tutorial showing you how to upload your photos:
Here's an interactive tutorial for the visual learners
Next up is the Experience section. Often overlooked, this is an essential part of your profile! It’s where you make your pitch to potential customers, explaining who you are, how long you’ve been in the transportation business, and why they should choose you.
Phrasing this is up to you, but we recommend being concise and to the point. Just because there’s no character limit doesn’t mean you should overload this section with so much text that customers end up skipping it. Feel free to check out other drivers’ profiles and see what they have listed here.
Here's an interactive video tutorial showing you how to edit the Experience section of your profile:
Here's an interactive tutorial for the visual learners
Here's an interactive tutorial for the visual learners
Your profile also shows the customer feedback statistics — your average star rating, your recent cancellation rate, as well as the number of shipments won and deliveries completed. You can’t edit this stuff directly — it’s all calculated automatically for you.
And finally, we get to the customer reviews, the key part of your profile. It’s what most people want to see when they visit the page — how well you’ve been doing and what the other customers have been saying.
Whenever you complete a shipment successfully, ask the customer to rate or review your performance. It’s absolutely vital that you build up favorable reviews as soon as possible — your bidding success rate depends on it! By clicking the “Mark Delivered” button in the shipment box, you can trigger an email that goes out to the customer, reminding them to leave you a review:
Selecting your shipment categories and routes
And finally, let’s take a peek behind the curtain to show you how the CitizenShipper platform actually functions.
When customers list their shipping jobs, we match them to drivers who can meet their requirements, and send out notifications asking them to bid on those jobs. But how do we do that? How does our algorithm know that a shipment is suitable for you?
Basically, we rely on the information you’ve provided us — the categories of items you’d like to ship, and the routes you’re interested in driving. (There’s actually more to the matching process, but for the purposes of this guide, these two criteria should suffice.)
So, in order to get matched to shipments that you’re able to deliver, you need to choose your settings carefully. The first of these — the categories — is set up for during your registration process. You’re asked to check the kinds of shipment you’re interested in: pets, vehicles, boats, motorcycles, heavy equipment, household items, and more.
The second of these — the routes — you need to set up manually. From your Dashboard, click the Routes button at the top of the page. This will take you to a new screen where you can check the states and cities you’d like to ship to or ship from.
Once you’ve set up your categories and your routes, our algorithm goes to work. It’ll notify you of every shipment listed that meets your criteria. For example, if you’ve selected “motorcycles” and “San Antonio”, we’ll send you a notification whenever someone needs a motorcycle shipped to or from the broader San Antonio area.
If you select too many categories or routes, you might get overwhelmed with notifications. That’s OK, though — you can just revisit your route or category settings as explained above, and narrow things down! You can also adjust your notification settings, choosing when and how you’d like us to message you. Here's an interactive video tutorial showing you how to do just that:
As the latter stages of the Onboarding guide will explain, planning is absolutely crucial to achieving success in transportation. You’ll need to think ahead, plot your routes, compare your fuel expenses to your potential earnings…
But let’s not get too far ahead of ourselves. We hope that this basic guide will provide you with a solid foundation to build on later. Once you’ve set up your account, your profile, and your category/route criteria, you’ll be on your way to success!
Be on the lookout for our next Onboarding guide, which will cover the background checks and some basic bidding strategies.
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