Is it weird to be more excited about a DoorDash product update than its just-announced, purpose-built airborne drone?
Don’t get me wrong, the drone, which will soon hit the skies in Northern California delivering food from restaurant to diner in about five minutes (on average), is impressive. Five minutes!
Still, I showed up to a media event at DoorDash HQ on Tuesday less interested in delivery drones and more into understanding what’s next for restaurants on DoorDash. (Here’s more about the drone if you’re into it.)
It’s been (exactly!) a year since DoorDash announced reservations inside its marketplace app. This was an exciting and potentially behavior-changing move, and a year into the experiment, DoorDash has proven its thesis that diners will, in fact, book reservations inside a delivery app. Now it’s connecting the dots with a “restaurant growth platform” called DashOS that should help operators better understand and engage their customers, building stronger relationships and encouraging repeat business.
At yesterday’s event in San Francisco, Parisa Sadrzadeh, DoorDash vice president of strategy and operations (and the exec I frequently talk to about restaurant things), explained how the company is linking formerly disparate products inside the just-announced DashOS. It connects tools across DoorDash: marketplace, direct ordering, reservations, loyalty, guest management, and marketing. Restaurants can track diners across services and direct them toward new channels and experiences with personalized recommendations and targeted marketing campaigns. In other words, all of DoorDash’s restaurant products talk to each other now — and they’re talking about all of us.
In an example presented from the stage, Sadrzadeh searched for a local Italian restaurant inside the DoorDash app. After adding dishes to her cart, a pop-up prompted her to quickly join the restaurant’s loyalty program (powered by DoorDash), sweetening the deal with an immediate and hard-to-refuse $5 off.
For the restaurant, Sadrzadeh said, “that guest just became a loyalty member with one click. The difference between a marketplace customer and a restaurant’s own customer just disappeared.”
(I did not think I’d ever see DoorDash excitedly direct diners away from its lucrative marketplace app and toward an individual restaurant, but times change, I guess.)
A week later, again in Sadrzadeh’s example, the officially loyal guest receives a marketing email directing them to order from the restaurant’s own website (powered by DoorDash). The diner can see their marketplace order history and personalized dish suggestions — a reminder they know and like the restaurant. Later, the diner might get a push notification for a nearby in-restaurant offer or an invitation to an in-person wine tasting, bookable using DoorDash reservations. (Or maybe both! Lucky them.) This diner behavior — order history, spend, visits, attention — is captured by DoorDash and shared with the restaurant, she explained, which makes a compelling case for a restaurant to adopt a ton of DoorDash products.
Whew. Still with me?
There’s a lot of power in these connections, and DoorDash says they create significant guest engagement. More than 1 in 5 — “I’m not sure why we framed it that way, it’s nearly 1 in 4,” Sadrzadeh later clarified — diners who visit the restaurant’s page in the DoorDash app sign up for a restaurant’s loyalty program when prompted. Once enrolled, customers order almost twice as often, spending 1.75 times as much compared to their non-loyalty peers.
And, again, a diner’s one-click opt-in to a loyalty program is “a direct conversion, moving that person from a marketplace customer to a first-party customer,” Sadrzadeh said.
But is ceding marketplace customers — customers who use the DoorDash app to search, browse, and order— to restaurants a good move for DoorDash? Won’t the company lose money, I asked her, if it’s missing out on potential marketplace commissions from these orders?
“If the merchant grows, that’s a good outcome for DoorDash, and for the consumer,” she said. “Restaurants are going to grow, and I think we just are going to meet consumers in the moments that make the most sense to them.”
It’s a lot easier (and more responsible) for DoorDash to do this now that it owns all the moments — from delivery to dine-in — and can apply data from one function to another. That also means the third-party vs. first-party distinction might not matter as much as it once did.
“I think restaurants are going to slowly become aware that the lines are blurring between the two,” Sadrzadeh said, “and I think that’ll be really powerful.”
Also powerful: an $80 billion commerce platform that has a lot — like a lot — of information about what, where, and how we like to eat to use to its advantage.
DoorDash’s other product announcements, ranked in order of my excitement level, include:
“Text DoorDash,” which is exactly what it sounds like: text DoorDash to order, and more, without opening the app. The AI assistant works inside text messages and can easily reorder favorites, like the same bowl of Marufuku ramen I eat at least once per week. (It can do a lot more than simply reorder; you can ask for recommendations, specific dishes, even your “usual” with all its modifications pre-selected.) Per the product release: It’s less like traditional online ordering and more like texting a friend while they’re standing in line at your local coffee shop: they already know your milk preference and can order your usual, or send you the menu so you can tell them what you want.
Returns on retail goods: I don’t (yet) use DoorDash to buy jeans from the Gap, but I’m sure some people do! For a flat $7.99 fee, customers can schedule return pickups to have DoorDash’s couriers return previously purchased but unwanted items in-store. They wait in line so you don’t have to.
The aforementioned DoorDash Air launch, which on Tuesday included three drones displayed on an outdoor mezzanine. Sleek and apparently quiet (DoorDash says the drone is about as loud as a passing car), the drones deliver orders in an average of five minutes. DoorDash air launches soon in a suburb near me with partners including Chipotle and Popeyes. Here’s another glamour shot:
photo courtesy of DoorDash
