Every taxi service has hours when there are more orders than cars. Friday evening, the morning after a snowfall, the end of a concert, the train station on holidays. At these moments the dispatcher tells the customer «no cars available» or «40-minute wait», and the customer calls a competitor. Worse, if this keeps happening, they stop calling you first.

An order exchange solves this problem without growing your fleet. In this article we look at how it works, how it differs from an aggregator, how your customer base is protected, and which handoff rules are worth setting up.

The problem of «extra» orders

Taxi demand is uneven across hours and days, while a service’s fleet is relatively fixed. Keeping enough drivers to cover peak demand is economically impossible: the rest of the time they’d sit idle and leave for competitors.

This leads to three scenarios that regularly play out in services in small and mid-sized cities:

1. Refusal. The customer is told there are no cars. The order is lost, the customer is unhappy, and they’re likely to try another service.
2. Long wait. The order is accepted, but pickup is in 30–40 minutes. Some customers cancel, some wait it out, and loyalty drops.
3. Driver overload. Drivers take two orders at a time, run late, and customers complain.

In all three cases the service loses money not only on that order but on that customer’s future orders. The exchange creates a fourth scenario: a driver from another service completes the order, and the customer stays yours.

How the order exchange works in UpTaxi

The mechanics are simple and fully automatic:

1. An order comes into your service through any channel — phone, app, website or bot.
2. The system offers it to your drivers under the usual dispatch rules — to the nearest one by road graph.
3. If none of your drivers accepts the order within the time you set, it goes to the exchange.
4. Drivers from other services connected to the exchange see the order. One of them accepts it and does the trip.
5. The customer gets a car, pickup notifications and a trip at your price.

The key point: the customer and the order data stay with your company. Phone number, addresses, trip history — everything is stored in your system. The other service’s driver sees only what’s needed to complete the order. They don’t get the customer’s contact into their database and can’t «poach» them. More on the mechanics on the Exchange page.

How the exchange differs from an aggregator

Almost every manager who first hears about the exchange asks this question. The difference is fundamental:

	Aggregator	Exchange between services
Who owns the customer	The aggregator	Your service
Who sets the price	The aggregator	You
Where the order history goes	Into the aggregator’s system	Into your system
Who takes the order	Any aggregator driver	Another service’s driver, under your rules
What happens after the trip	The customer is tied to the aggregator’s app	The customer stays yours and calls you

An aggregator is a model where your service becomes a car supplier for someone else’s brand. The exchange is a model where services in one city help each other cover peaks while staying independent.

Why it pays off for both sides

The exchange only works when several services take part, and each has a reason to do so.

The service handing off the order: — doesn’t lose the customer when it’s short of cars; — doesn’t keep an oversized fleet for peaks; — keeps its price and its brand in the customer’s eyes.

The service whose driver completes the order: — keeps its drivers busy during its «quiet» hours; — gets extra revenue with no customer acquisition cost; — reduces empty mileage — an exchange order may be closer by road graph than waiting for one of its own.

Peaks at different services rarely overlap completely. One has corporate clients and a morning peak, another has the train station and night orders, a third has a residential area and evening trips. The exchange lets you use this difference.

How to set up handoff rules

The exchange isn’t an «on» button. It’s a set of parameters that define when and which orders go to other services’ drivers. The main settings to think through:

Waiting time for your own drivers

How many seconds or minutes an order is offered only to your drivers before it goes to the exchange. Too short an interval, and you’ll start handing off orders your drivers would have taken half a minute later. Too long, and the customer will cancel. A reasonable starting point is the time it usually takes your driver to accept an order at normal times, multiplied by two to three. Then adjust based on statistics.

Which orders not to hand off

Some categories are better kept for your own drivers: corporate contracts with special terms, VIP customers, cashless contract orders, intercity trips. For these you can increase the waiting time or exclude them from the exchange entirely.

Priority at peak hours

During peak hours it makes sense to try surge pricing first — raise the price so the order becomes more attractive to your own drivers — and only then send it to the exchange. The chain «own drivers at the normal price → own drivers at a higher price → exchange» gives maximum margin with minimum customer loss. How dynamic rate changes work is described on the Cost calculation page.

Quality control

Since another service’s driver completes the order, you need to see how they did it: pickup time, cancellations, complaints. Order statistics and reports are collected in the manager’s account. If exchange orders are consistently completed worse than your own, that’s a reason to revisit intervals and exclusions.

Want to see how the exchange handles your peaks? Services with 50+ completed orders per day can get a 30-day trial at no charge — terms on the pricing page.

What the customer sees

For the customer, handing the order to the exchange is invisible. They ordered a taxi from your service, got a message or call with the car’s plate number and pickup time, and rode at the price they were quoted. Auto-notifications follow your script, and the app shows your brand.

The only thing a customer might notice is that the car isn’t from «your» fleet, if the service has a uniform livery. In small and mid-sized cities, where most drivers use their own cars, this is usually not a problem.

What the other service’s driver sees

A driver accepting an exchange order sees in the «UpTaxi Driver» app what’s needed for the trip: pickup address, destination, price, conditions. The customer’s data doesn’t get into their service’s database — they complete a specific order and nothing more.

Check the terms of settlements between services for exchange orders with UpTaxi support when you connect: they depend on how cooperation between services is organized in your city.

Three situations where the exchange is especially useful

A seasonal city. In a resort city, demand grows several times over in summer and drops in winter. Keeping a summer-sized fleet all year is impossible. The exchange lets you cover summer peaks with drivers from other services and not lose customers. Seasonality is one of the market features mentioned, for example, by Sevtaxi from Sevastopol.

A new service. At launch a service has few drivers but already has advertising and calls. If you answer «no cars available», your ad budget goes to waste. The exchange lets you fulfill orders from day one while your own fleet grows.

The night shift. At night many services keep one or two drivers. An order to the other end of the city means the service has nobody to send for the next 40 minutes. With the exchange, night orders are covered by drivers who are free at neighboring services at that time.

What the exchange doesn’t solve

The exchange is a tool for peaks and dips, not a replacement for your own fleet. If a service is chronically short of drivers, the exchange will cover a large share of orders, and the margin on them is lower than on your own. Economically that’s still better than turning the customer away, but strategically you need to work on attracting and retaining drivers.

The exchange also doesn’t remove the need to monitor quality: the order is completed by someone who isn’t your employee, and the customer judges your service by their work. So check reports on exchange orders at least as often as on your own.

How to connect

The driver exchange is part of the UpTaxi base package — like the other modules, it isn’t sold separately. To get started:

1. Launch your service on UpTaxi — the server is set up within a day, configuration is remote.
2. Set the handoff rules: intervals, exclusions, priorities.
3. Check the first exchange orders in the reports in the manager’s account.
4. Adjust the intervals based on the results of the first one or two weeks.

The service pays under the usual scheme — a daily fee from 150 ₽ per day and a commission of 7% to 10% of driver commission, depending on volume; from 501 orders per day there is no daily fee.

In brief

• An order exchange hands an order to another service’s driver if your own drivers didn’t take it within a set time.
• The customer, their contacts and history stay with your service; the other driver only does the trip.
• Unlike with an aggregator, you keep your price, brand and customer base.
• Setup comes down to waiting intervals, exclusions and priorities relative to surge pricing.
• The exchange covers peaks, seasonality, night shifts and a new service’s launch, but doesn’t replace your own fleet.

If you regularly turn customers away because you’re short of cars, the exchange is the fastest way to stop. Request 30-day access on the pricing page or message us on Telegram or on Max.