The Side Hustle

Evri

What is Evri? A question asked by all customers of the juggernaut delivery empire formally know as Hermes. After prompting the site manager at my local Evri depot during my “interview” I learnt that Hermes changed their name to Evri after years and years of poor customer service and an even worse company reputation. Nonetheless, when I came across the YouTube video titled ‘How much I earned as an Evri driver (self employed)’ I was instantly intrigued. The Side Hustle was on.

The best way to highlight this Stella review of Evri is in Pro and Con format. So let’s break it down;

Pros

Insurance is paid for each day you work for £1.15
Work days normally last 3 hours
Essentially no manager
Only work when you want to
Deliver local
You can collect your parcels at 10am and choose when you want to deliver them

Cons

Paid per parcel (can only fit so many in your car)
Full time employees are prioritised
Petrol not paid for
Pays monthly

It’s important to remember you use your own car to complete the deliveries and of course driving a car filled with parcels will use petrol. It was something I was initially worried about, however I recorded my mileage on my departure and then on my return. 19 miles. 19! . 15 of which was the Actual delivering, the remaining the journey to and from the depot. I was over the moon. The price of petrol when I did this work was about 10p more expensive per litre than now however. On average I received about 60 parcels each time I worked, some of which were collections. This was sometimes a tight squeeze getting them all in but manageable.

Now the most important thing about this post. The pay. How much can you make as a part time self employed Evri driver? Well, I worked 4 shifts for Evri over a month period , working an average of 3 hours ( loading the car and delivering). Below Is the payslip I received(only 3 of the shifts are documented on this payslip)

I received an introductory bonus of £25, so once you take that off you can see £104 over 3 shifts. With an average of 3 hours work a day, this works out at £11.55 an hour. Obviously this is subject to change depending on many factors. The picture below details the pay scales of the parcels.

Conclusion

Working for Evri was easy, albeit stressful having to deal with 50-60 deliveries in a short space of time. I don’t want to drag this conclusion out, so, I’m going to get straight to the point. I’m giving Evri a 9/10 Certified Side Hustle approval rating. As side hustles go, it was almost perfect. The major downside being restrictions on when you can work however as a side hustle this wouldn’t really affect people who just want to pick up a couple shifts a week. My Experience was positive and quite frankly very easy, I grabbed a coffee and put my podcast in and it was over before I knew it. If you have a hatchback and some spare time head down to your local Evri depot and pick up some shifts.

Depop

If eBay and Instagram had a baby, is the only short way of decribing Depop. A social media site used by normal people to sell clothing online used by over 30 million people. To cut to the chase, Depop selling is something I have personally tried and failed many times albeit some success was made initially. The real trick to cracking the Depop algorithm? Persistence. And of course all the trimming that go along with having a successful Depop shop. Now seeing as I’ve already attempted this Side Hustle I luckily have about 3 months of work to share with you.

As you can see in the image above, I managed to gather 2938 followers on my shop where I posted over 40 items for sale(not all sold). Followers are one of the most important things to a depop page, its one of the first thing myself and every other customer looks at before purchasing. Now, obviously you don’t need a million followers to sell a t-shirt online, however it lets the customer feel like they can trust you and you’re services a little better. The real driving force that will help your Depop gain traction is how much time and effort you put into it. To get those 5 star reviews (shown above in image are 20 5 star reviews on my page) you will need to market an attractive brand.

Something I chose to do was start a Instagram page for my shop and spam follow as many people I could who were related to vintage clothing accounts. This isn’t really that important however I wanted to generate as many followers to my page as I could. If someone was to see one of my items on instagram they could quite easily follow the link to my account.

The image above shows my attempt to;

Create a Brand Logo for my Shop
Have a simple clear background
Show the full item and all its specifications in good lighting
Most importantly by having presentable brand image
Writing a accurate description and including keywords

This didn’t cost me a lot to do, the hanging lights, the cardboard cutouts and the sticky wall hooks came to about £9 maybe. The real cost is the clothing you sell. Now I’m sure many of you will have lots of old clothes or shoes you no longer wear however if you want to make real money on Depop you will need to resell. That can mean going to a charity shop and finding bargains, buying on eBay and selling on depop for a profit or Bulk buy online. Bulk buying is what most of these successful Depop shops do, I reached out to several Depop shops of which I personally buy from. These sellers upload hundreds of items a week and turn thousands of profit a month. I essentially asked them what their secret sauce was? Where do they get the clothes from that they mark up 10,15,25% per item? Well as you can guess very few replied and the ones that did pretty much said I’m not telling you. So in the height of lockdown I went online and purchased a bulk buy order in an attempt to be a Depop thousandaire! I Spent £225 on the box which had 40 items inside. Working out at £5.60 an item. I was over the moon when it arrived… however the website had clearly misleads me as I was presented with utter trash. Items wear extra small to medium mainly or unheard of brands. I managed to pick out about just 8 items that I would upload to my site of which 4 sold, amassing a spectacular £37. A lesson was learned however. Always be sure!

Conclusion

The moment you have all been waiting for is Depop a good side hustle to get into? Well my answer would be Yes. Depop can be whatever you make of it, 2 hours a day or 6. £100 invested or £1000. As long as you keep at it and post attractive posts you will begin to gain a following and ultimately start making money. My Depop which is still up and active is split into bulk buy, depop reselling and charity shop finds, so the profits aren’t comparable however I will tell you exactly how much I made from selling. So I sold 16 items on depop over the space of about 3 months. From those 16 items I made £377. Yes Depop is worth it and yes it is definitely a grind. If I had more time and put more into it I could have definitely made more money. So if you have some clothes lying around you don’t wear anymore and a couple hours then why not set up a Depop account, because one mans trash is another mans Treasure.

Side Hustle Certified

Attempting the Side Hustle

Like so many young people in today’s world I have found myself searching the internet for side hustles and the best way of making that extra cash. But how many of these “side hustles” are actually profitable? This is where I will go through as many side hustles as I can in an attempt to not only make some extra money, but to filter through the bad and misleading “side hustles”. Welcome to The Side Hustle.

What is a side hustle ?

To put it simply, a side hustle is extra revenue you make outside of your everyday job or studies. A side hustle can include online interaction such as Stock and shares or it can be more physical like delivering parcels as a Courier. The most important to remember is this is not “passive” income. A lot of creators paint the brush of passive income across side hustles when in-fact there is nothing “passive” about it. It’s in the name. Hustle. There’s grind involved in all of these, including the one you are reading right now. Yes, a blog , believe it or not is the number one rated side hustle on most internet sites I’ve researched. So I guess one of my chapters in the future will be , ‘The Blog’. That however is for another day.

Join me in my next Blog post where I try, breakdown and ultimately give my opinion on the most important question . Is it worth it?