Third-party delivery is often seen by the consumer as a monolith. Whether you’re opening the DoorDash, Uber Eats, or Grubhub apps, as a customer, it’s roughly the same experience: You scroll through the app to find what you want, quickly order some food, and brace for the impact of tacked-on service fees and surcharges. But in reality, DoorDash has about 67% of the food delivery space market share, with Uber Eats in a distant second and Grubhub even further behind in third place.
Even though DoorDash is so far ahead of its competitors in market share, does that translate into customer experience? The answer, in many ways, is yes. According to mystery shopper data from Intouch Insight, which collected experiences from 300 delivery orders across the three main delivery platforms, DoorDash offered more promotions, delivered to the right location, and delivered the correct food more often than its two major competitors.
While, for many of the study’s categories, the three delivery services were neck-and-neck, DoorDash blew the competition out of the water for delivery times. DoorDash’s average delivery time was 26 minutes and 24 seconds for restaurants, while Grubhub was 35 minutes and 49 seconds. Uber Eats was 38 minutes and 4 seconds — almost 50% longer than DoorDash’s average delivery time.
“We have a trademark slogan that burritos travel better,” said Luke Christian, founder and CEO of Surcheros Fresh Mex. “They reheat well, too. … We just want our partners to continue to monitor and push for the safety and cleanliness of the delivery drivers. Those were the things we were wary of when we started to do DoorDash during the pandemic. So far, it has been a very good decision. But as to the questions of who’s delivering your food and what are they like, you don’t see them at all. They just pick up the food and drop it off.”
Overall, 90% of mystery shoppers were satisfied with their DoorDash delivery experience, while Uber Eats and Grubhub received general satisfaction scores of 87% and 79%, respectively.
The answer to DoorDash’s dominance thus far in the delivery wars might be simple. Uber is the bigger company, but it is stretched between two main revenue categories (ridesharing and delivery), and Grubhub just doesn’t have the same number of resources that the other two have.
“When the general public hears Uber, they automatically think ride sharing,” said Michael Schatzberg, cofounder of Branded Hospitality Ventures. “Whereas DoorDash is purely delivery, so from a marketing perspective, DoorDash had the edge, because the only thing they did was food delivery. … Grubhub owned the New York City market when they were Seamless, but they had a lot of issues financially. … Today, everyone just associates DoorDash with food delivery. They have more money to advertise. You see them all over the place.”
While market share is not necessarily directly correlated with customer satisfaction, there is clearly an association between the two, according to Intouch Insight’s survey. Jim Sanderson, restaurant research analyst at Northcoast Research believes that it’s all related.
“Having the frequency and order volume that DoorDash does can drive efficiency and accuracy because it becomes a virtuous cycle,” Sanderson said. “The more orders you have, the more you can offer your driver, the better drivers you can get, and those drivers will execute better because they’re compensated well.”
Sanderson pointed out that DoorDash even began experimenting with a pilot program in Austin, Texas, that shifts away from the independent contractor model. An independent LLC hires and employs the drivers, which then has exclusive rights of picking up DoorDash orders. By offering set schedules and guaranteed pay based on the quality of the deliveries and not just the quantity, Sanderson said, it’s incentivizing drivers to do a better job.
“Third-party delivery provides a valuable service, but they are anything but free,” said Steve Greer, chief marketing officer of Urban Plates. “Urban Plates passes along some of the costs that third-party delivery companies charge because it would be fiscally impossible to absorb these costs. If delivery companies were to reduce their commissions, we would pass along those savings to the end users. However, the delivery companies are currently focused on getting restaurants to discount prices so that the delivery companies can provide more value to end-users. … This appears to be a priority for DoorDash.”
DoorDash confirmed that the company has been experimenting with different pay structures for drivers like this one, as well as a program introduced in 2021 that offered direct employment for DashMart couriers, and a choice for drivers to “earn by time” as a guaranteed hourly rate instead of per-task earnings, which was introduced in 2023.
Another way delivery services are starting to pick up speed is by expanding to other verticals like groceries, convenience stores, and more. For example, DoorDash has an exclusive partnership with Ulta beauty store and is the only food delivery company out of the big three to offer delivery of Sephora products, as part of its new beauty vertical.
“The more they do it, the more they're going to mimic the Amazon model, which will let them create efficiencies on their driver schedule,” Sanderson said. “If I'm a DoorDash driver, I have to stop by the hardware store and the drug store, and grocery store and then a restaurant, and I have to pick up and deliver within a two-mile radius, I can probably knock out all four of those orders in an hour, and that's going to give me a really nice level of compensation.”
The problem with working with multiple verticals is that it could lead to quality slipups as drivers strive to be more efficient while they’re delivering multiple items from different restaurants and other retailers. For example, food temperature was one of the few categories from the study that DoorDash did not take the lead in. While Uber Eats drivers delivered food at the correct temperature 92% of the time, DoorDash’s acceptable temperature rate was 90%, while Grubhub was 89%. Intouch Insight noted that if drivers picked up a customer’s order and delivered other orders first, it had a substantial negative impact on quality of service, including speed and customer satisfaction. Surprisingly, despite Uber’s high score on food temperature, that app was most likely to complete other deliveries before delivering a customer’s order. On average, 12% of delivery drivers across the apps were guilty of this efficiency tactic.
In the post-COVID delivery era, DoorDash president and chief operating officer Prabir Adarkar said it’s more important than ever to figure out how to make speed, efficiency, and quality work in tandem. For example, DoorDash built instructions for Dashers to help find houses so they don’t just rely on maps, in case an address is particularly difficult to find. For previous customers, Dashers can see a photo of their door so they know if they’re delivering to the right house and rectify it if they’re not. (This could explain why DoorDash has 99% accuracy when it comes to location accuracy.)
When it comes to accurate food temperature, Adarkar said, DoorDash is working on it by algorithmically pairing the best Dasher for each order. For example, if they have a Dasher who is delivering ice cream, they won’t also want to pair that with a pizza order unless that person has a separate hot bag for the pizza to make sure the ice cream doesn’t melt.
“There’s no silver bullet for this, unfortunately,” Adarkar said. “In this business, if we do seven million orders a day, the vast majority occur without a hitch. But then that one in a million ‘bad order’ happens to us at least seven times a day. So there’s an opportunity to learn every single day.”
Besides food temperature, the only area where DoorDash did not come out on top in this study was with delivery fees. On average, Uber Eats had the least expensive delivery fees, but the most expensive service fees. On the other hand, Grubhub had the most expensive delivery fees that were offset by having the least expensive service fees. DoorDash’s fees were right in the middle for both delivery and service fees, at $2.22 and $3.63, respectively.
Adarkar said they help to lower consumer fees by encouraging customers to join the company’s premium service, DashPass, and by incentivizing restaurants to offer discounts and keep menu prices low on the app.
“The rich data that we're using can help inform other decisions we make with the Dasher, which reduces the wait time for the Dasher waiting around for the food to be ready,” Adarkar said. “That’s one example of optimizing the system based on our data in order to actually yield efficiency and therefore savings that we can then use to further invest in making Dashpass cheaper and lowering your fees.”
Even though DoorDash has become the dominant platform for food delivery, it is far from the default app, like Amazon or Google might be in their respective lanes. One way a delivery app can become more competitive is through strategic partnerships, Sanderson said, like Grubhub’s new partnership with Amazon Prime and Uber’s partnership with Instacart, allowing Grubhub customers to order food delivery through Amazon and Uber customers to order delivery through Instacart. Of course, DoorDash has also been racking up the partnerships, and specifically has become known for its retail and grocery partnerships.
Even Grubhub, which lags behind its competitors in market share according to this study, has been adding features beyond just the new Amazon partnership to entice customers and improve guest experience. Grubhub just began offering priority delivery times at a more premium price to customers, which is reminiscent of Uber’s priority pickup options for its rideshare services.
As Grubhub and Uber Eats continue to announce new features and partnerships, DoorDash isn’t going to rest on its laurels just because the company is at the top of its game right now.
“DoorDash is going to lean in, just like they always have, so maybe they will start offering promotions to drive traffic,” Sanderson said. “Right now, it’s still a very promotional environment. I still see it as all land-grabbing. We’ve got three major players that are well capitalized and that are competing to maintain or expand their COVID-era shares across industry silos.”
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