DoorDash takes the health of its marketplace seriously. For DoorDash to work, we need it to work for consumers, Dashers, and merchants - together. The topic of menu pricing on DoorDash has become an important one, and we’d like to explain how we work to create a fair and high-quality marketplace that works for all.
To maintain a high-quality marketplace and further build consumer trust, we’ve shared insights into various factors that can affect a restaurant's visibility in-app including, but not limited to:
Customer Experience: Our mission at DoorDash is to help businesses grow. We aim to drive repeat business for local merchants by helping customers discover stores that consistently provide a first-rate experience on every order. This is why we take positive customer ratings and reviews, and robust optimized menus into account when highlighting restaurants.
Quality Metrics: Working together with restaurant partners to ensure low order error rates by checking each order for accuracy, keeping cancellation rates low, and monitoring overall delivery times drives increased customer loyalty, repeat business for merchants, and more earning opportunities for Dashers.
Menu Pricing: Marked-up menu prices are one of the top customer complaints DoorDash receives. This can discourage customers from ordering and lead to decreased sales and lower reorder rates for restaurants and fewer earning opportunities for Dashers. While we encourage menu prices that more closely reflect in store, DoorDash does not require delivery prices to match in-store. Restaurants can continue to make their own delivery menu pricing decisions and assess the trade-offs between volume and unit margins. Operators have the flexibility to balance growth and profitability, and optimal menu prices will ultimately vary by store and brand.
To protect the health of the marketplace for all stakeholders, we reserve the right to remove merchants from the platform that degrade the overall customer experience and compromise trust in DoorDash - whether that be due to extremely poor Customer Ratings, poor quality metrics, or extreme levels of price inflation.
The above characteristics, shared by many of our successful restaurant partners, are critical to providing customers with a more trustworthy, reliable, and quality experience. These are the experiences customers have come to expect on DoorDash, so these restaurants receive higher visibility in-app. This is to account for customer preference, the health of the Marketplace, and to promote ongoing growth for all restaurants on the platform.
We are proud to have driven more than $100 billion in sales for merchants over the last decade and helped Dashers earn over $35 billion through the platform. We’ll continue working to balance and uphold the needs of each audience we serve — consumers, merchant partners, and Dashers. As we innovate, iterate, and implement new features, products, and services, we will continue to solicit feedback whether this is through our Restaurant Advisory Council or our Dasher Community Council. We will never lose sight of our mission to grow and empower local economies.
