This article was originally published in 2016. For a more up-to-date explanation of how DoorDash works, see these articles on the DoorDash for Merchants blog:
Original article below:
At DoorDash, we have one goal: to get whatever people need in their hands as efficiently as possible. Today, that mission is focused around delivering food, but in the future, we hope to deliver from any local store in their city.
On-demand delivery is new to many consumers, so naturally people often ask us how DoorDash works. Today, I wanted to highlight some details about our business, describe a few changes we are making to make ordering from DoorDash even easier, and reaffirm a few of our core principles.
How we work with restaurants
One of our key principles is to provide customers with the very best selection of restaurants. We fulfill this promise by identifying the most popular restaurants that offer take-out in each city and connecting customers with Dashers who pick up orders from those restaurants and bring them to customers’ doors. As a logistics company, DoorDash matches supply and demand across three different audiences: if a restaurant offers orders to go, and customers want it delivered, we’ll connect them with a Dasher to provide that service.
For restaurants that want to provide additional operational efficiency and receive data analytics for their orders, we provide the opportunity to partner with us in a more formal relationship. We have struck these types of partnerships with thousands of restaurants around the country: from national chains like Taco Bell and Dunkin’ Donuts to smaller local restaurants like Oren’s Hummus and ‘wichcraft.
Regardless of the relationship, restaurants have told us that they’ve seen increased sales, new customers and improved operations thanks to our ordering apps and delivery services. And with the DoorDash platform coming to more and more cities, a growing number of customers are able to have the best of their city delivered right to their door.
What you pay when ordering through DoorDash
We recently made some changes to how prices are displayed on menu pages and at checkout to ensure customers have more information about what they are paying when using DoorDash.
Now when ordering on DoorDash, customers pay for the price of their food and any local taxes, plus a delivery fee, an optional Dasher tip and a service fee. The service fee is simply our way of breaking out existing fees that were previously built in to menus and providing more information about how orders are priced. The change should not significantly impact the overall price of ordering on DoorDash and does not affect delivery fees. While some people may see orders with higher total charges, on average we expect that ordering from DoorDash will actually cost less with this change.
Additionally, because restaurants that have a formal partnership with us share the cost of providing delivery, we’re able to remove the service fee for deliveries from these restaurants. With this update, the menu prices on DoorDash should generally be the same as they would be when ordered in-store.
Moving Forward
Our commitment to merchants, Dashers and customers remains the same as it has from the day we launched three years ago. As we look to the future, we’re excited to continue enabling delightful deliveries and empowering local economies across North America and beyond.
