Alcohol delivery is here to stay – how can apps tackle underage drinking?

Buying alcohol online has become easier than ever. Supermarkets are selling six-packs through Instacart, restaurants on Uber Eats have wine on their menus, and apps like Drizly and Saucey bring hard liquor to their customers’ doorstep in less than 60 minutes.

For the most part, this has been a good thing. Delivery apps provided relief to local businesses amid stay-at-home orders and minimized the need for human interaction.

Now that the pandemic is waning, it’s clear that alcohol on-demand is here to stay. Many of the loosened laws that made it possible are becoming permanent and delivery apps are striking record deals to seize the market.

Earlier this year, Uber acquired Drizly for $1.1 billion in stock and cash. Vivino, GoPuff, and Instacart have raised substantial backing from investors who are betting big on the market’s future. By any measure, this industry is the one to watch.

Underage drinking on the rise

Before we raise a glass to alcohol delivery, though, we need to do more to promote responsible drinking and protect the vulnerable. The easier it is to access alcoholic beverages, the greater the risk of misuse and abuse – as evidenced by recent research.

In the US, apps were found to routinely let minors order alcohol. ‘’There have been instances in which the licensee’s own employees have done so, but a far greater rate has been evident among third-party delivery services,’’ a report by California Department of Alcoholic Beverage Control stated.

There’s more. In Australia, a reported 61% of users were already intoxicated when they received their order. And in the UK, charities are calling for tighter rules on firms they claim are making drop-offs to children under 18 and problem drinkers.

The pressure is high on these apps to make every reasonable effort to verify a user’s age when selling alcohol, as failure to do so may lead to hefty fines and closures.

But it’s not easy. Apps must navigate a maze of regulations that are often unclear and dated. For instance, while it’s prohibited to sell alcohol to underage drinkers, it is still unclear where and how exactly ID checks should happen – at the time of purchase, at delivery, or both.

Plus, most couriers are working zero-hour contracts and, in a rush to move onto the next order, don’t bother verifying a customer’s age. Some even leave drinks on the porch as if it were any other contactless delivery.

Age gates aren’t enough

Better steps need to be taken to verify users are old enough to access age-restricted products and services. Relying on users to enter their date of birth into a web form or tick a box to prove they’re over a certain age limit doesn’t cut it anymore.

Instead, the more progressive alcohol delivery apps now feature ID scanning to help drivers carry out age verification checks more quickly and reliably. A driver simply scans the customer’s ID at the door and gets notified if the document holder is of legal age to purchase alcohol and, in some cases, whether or not the ID is authentic. 

Drizly and GoPuff have all rolled this feature out. They’ve implemented BlinkID — a mobile SDK for ID document scanning — into their apps to quickly capture key information from ID cards, driver licenses, and other government-issued identity documents. This is helping them:

• Deliver alcohol in a safe, contactless way: With BlinkID, drivers are able to scan a user’s ID at a safe distance, and the document never changes hands.
• Verify a user’s age. BlinkID displays a warning message if the document holder is underage. The limit can be set depending on the country’s minimum legal drinking age.
• Get up and running with no training. Drivers who may not be tech-savvy can still use BlinkID without any issue. The average time to scan takes less than 2 seconds.
• Keep user data secure. The SDK works offline, on-device, and the personal information never leaves the app. This also means the scan will go through even if the user is located in a remote area with no internet connection.
• Check the validity of a document. BlinkID weeds out forged and expired documents whose sides don’t match or contain incorrectly formatted data.
• Match the ID with the document holder. As the driver is scanning the document, BlinkID snaps a clear, high-resolution image of its owner’s face. A driver can then easily check that the person they’re handing alcohol to matches the photo of the person on the ID.

 
Done right, ID scanning can be a simple, secure, and scalable way of ensuring alcohol deliveries are never handed to minors. 

The future of the delivery industry is promising, and is likely to be propelled forward by consumers who’ve grown accustomed to ordering more items in then they used to, which can include anything from alcohol to prescription drugs. For these age-restricted items, however, companies will need to keep security and safety top of mind, to protect both minors and their own business.

Want to add seamless ID scanning to your app? Let’s talk.