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External employees

You need: Employees — edit.

An external employee is a contracted driver who is part of your own fleet — someone who delivers for you but is not on your payroll.

The distinction that matters

Three kinds of driver, easy to confuse:

What they are Managed
Internal driver Your own staff Here, as a normal employee
External / contracted driver Contracted, but part of your fleet Here — this page
Third-party carrier A delivery company you hand orders to Not here — External carriers

The middle one is the one this page is about. A contracted driver is still your fleet: the dispatcher assigns them individually, by name, exactly as it does your own staff. A third-party carrier is a company — you hand it the order and it picks the courier.

If you are setting up a courier platform, you are in the wrong place; go to External carriers.

Creating one

Create the external employee against the brand, then set their hub and driver configuration as you would for any driver — see Editing an employee.

How the dispatcher treats them

Contracted drivers rank below internal drivers. When both could take an order, the internal one wins, and an internal driver can take an order away from a contracted one — never the reverse. The full ranking is in Driver classification and priority.

Two consequences worth knowing:

  • A zone that doesn't list their type will never give them work. Empty allowed-driver-types on a zone blocks all own drivers, contracted included — see Delivery zones.
  • A store with no internal drivers is treated more leniently. Its own-fleet delay tolerance is automatically replaced by the third-party value, so an all-contracted store isn't held to a standard it can't meet — see Store delivery settings.

Adding several at once

Use the CSV import rather than creating them one at a time — see Importing and exporting employees.

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