10 Years and 5 Billion Orders Later, DoorDash Expands to More On-Demand Categories

In DoorDash’s decade of operation, the company has taken the restaurant aggregator business model and expanded it to so much more, shifting its goals from food delivery to providing everything on demand.

The company’s recent Dash Forward virtual event showcased the aggregator’s shift from its origins, with company executives sharing the integration of new tabs into the DoorDash marketplace — a grocery tab, a retail tab, and a “browse” tab. With these shifts, the aggregator’s non-restaurant offerings rise to greater prominence.

“We started with the highest frequency category with the greatest coverage in serving restaurants,” DoorDash CEO Tony Xu said in a presentation, “but we now support grocers like Albertsons, Aldi, Loblaws, Coles and Sprouts, convenience stores like CVS and Walgreens, and retail shops like Sephora, Office Depot, PetSmart and Dick’s Sporting Goods. … One day consumers will be able to buy any item from their city.”

DoorDash, the United States’ leading aggregator, was not the first restaurant delivery marketplace to launch in the country, but it has been perhaps the most active in pushing the bounds of the on-demand delivery.

In 2018, five years into the company’s existence, the aggregator took on Instacart with its pilot test of a delivery partnership with Walmart, and while the deal came to an end four years later, DoorDash’s grocery delivery efforts have only continued to expand.

Plus, the aggregator was a pioneer in the convenience space. Years before Grubhub launched its Grubhub Goods digital c-store and before Instacart and Aldi launched Aldi Express, DoorDash, back in 2020, launched DashMart, its in-house virtual convenience store.

Today, DoorDash delivers everything from meal kits to lingerie to machetes. The company says that in 10 years it has facilitated 5 billion consumer orders and driven over $100 billion in sales for merchants.

Overall, aggregator usage is becoming more common. Data from PYMNTS’ exclusive report “Connected Dining: Third-Party Restaurant Aggregators Keep the Young and Affluent Engaged,” which draws from a survey of nearly 2,300 U.S. consumers conducted in March, finds that 40% of all respondents reported having used an aggregator at least once in the past six months, and young consumers are leading the charge. In fact, 69% of Generation Z consumers reported the same.

Additionally, online grocery is becoming more popular. Data from PYMNTS’ study “Tracking the Digital Payments Takeover: Catching the Coming eCommerce Wave,” created in collaboration with Amazon Web Services, which draws from an April survey of a census-balanced panel of nearly 2,700 U.S. consumers, reveals that, while only 12% of grocery transactions are carried out online, about 1 in 3 consumers plans to shop for their groceries online more in the next year.

The company has also been ahead of the curve on driving loyalty through memberships. The aggregator launched its DashPass membership program back in the summer of 2018, well before Uber’s first iteration of its delivery membership launched in the spring of 2019 and Grubhub+’s launch in early 2020.

Earlier this year, DoorDash shared its intention to make the program as popular as Netflix.

“There’s a lot of room to grow. If you think about the size of the DashPass program, 15 million subs. It’s still a far cry from other programs, whether it’s the number of Netflix members or Prime subscribers,” then-CFO (now COO) Prabir Adarkar said on an earnings call in February. “There’s a lot of room for us to continue growing, and we’re happy with the pace of growth historically and we’re not seeing any signs of that slowing down.”