Announcing “Main Street Strong”- Our Commitment to Helping Restaurants On the Road to Recovery
I think often about growing up, washing dishes alongside my mother in the restaurant where she worked. Succeeding in the restaurant industry requires an unmatched level of grit, ingenuity, and determination, as well as an unwavering dedication to serving others. That’s never been truer than it is now. It’s why I started DoorDash: to help restaurants come online to reach customers who may not be walking through their doors, to better serve those customers online and offline, and to keep Main Streets strong in the new online world.
Looking Back
At the start of this crisis, as restaurant dining rooms were closing, we knew we had a responsibility to help them make it to the other side. Beginning in early March, we rolled out a series of relief and support initiatives to help our restaurant partners and the industry as a whole. Altogether, our relief programs, which conclude on May 31, have helped restaurants save approximately $120 million since mid-March. We’re proud to report that restaurants on DoorDash are four times more likely to have remained open during the COVID-19 pandemic compared to U.S. restaurants as a whole* — and we’re ready to help them continue to stay up and running.
Looking Ahead
As shelter-in-place orders start to slowly lift around the country and restaurants begin to welcome guests back into their patios and dining rooms, we remain committed to helping our restaurant partners navigate what comes next.
So today, we’re announcing Main Street Strong, a series of initiatives designed to help restaurants get back on their feet and accelerate into this new future.
Main Street Strong
At DoorDash, we’ve always prided ourselves on being a merchant-first company. And with Main Street Strong, we’re launching a suite of products, programs and policies — tailored to restaurants’ unique needs and inspired by their feedback — to help restaurants reimagine and grow their business.
Through conversations with our partners over the past two months, we’ve learned that restaurants are looking to develop multiple ways to engage with customers: to continue offering the dine-in experience we all love, building their own digital ordering solutions to meet consumers’ needs as they move online, and reaching new customers and receiving additional orders through marketplaces like ours. In this new environment, restaurants will need to be best-in-class digital businesses, and we believe we can help.
Building every restaurant its own digital Storefront
Early on with DoorDash Drive, we hoped to help restaurants and other businesses by leveraging our logistics network to power the delivery of orders coming through their own channels. By accessing our logistics platform and a nationwide fleet of Dashers to fulfill those deliveries, restaurants could reach their customers on-demand without having to invest in or build their own in-house technology. Today, businesses ranging from mom-and-pops to Fortune 500 companies use DoorDash Drive to deliver goods from their own web and mobile platforms, often in addition to being on the DoorDash Marketplace.
As part of our promise to help restaurants get back on their feet, we want to empower any restaurant to build and operate their own end-to-end digital ordering solution. So today, we are introducing DoorDash Storefront, which enables restaurants to create their own online stores at the click of a button. Through these online stores, customers can order takeout or delivery directly from the restaurant, with deliveries fulfilled by DoorDash Dashers. Because this is the restaurant’s channel, they control the customer experience and do not pay a commission to DoorDash on orders they receive through their Storefront.
By our estimate, 40% of our restaurant partners today do not have an online ordering system. Our goal is to provide these restaurants, many of them small, independent businesses, with a solution to continue adapting through this challenging time, driving incremental sales and reaching new customers through their own channels. We’re accelerating the rollout of DoorDash Storefront in the coming weeks. Interested restaurants can sign up for the waitlist here, and we’ll be bringing restaurants onto Storefront throughout the month. DoorDash Storefront will be widely available in July, and we’ll be waiving set-up, subscription, and merchant delivery fees through the end of 2020 for restaurants with 5 or fewer locations who sign up before the end of the year.
For restaurants that would prefer to have DoorDash manage their digital ordering experience by simply redirecting their customers to DoorDash, we are expanding our Weblinks program and offering 0% commission on all Weblink orders, both delivery and pick up, through the end of the year for restaurants with 5 or fewer locations. This means that any independent restaurant with an established digital presence can add a link to their DoorDash store on their website to instantly offer their customers on-demand access to their menu at no cost to the merchant. Learn more and sign up here.
Driving Discovery & Demand on the DoorDash Marketplace.
In addition to helping restaurants build their own ways of reaching customers, we are continuing to create new ways to drive discovery and demand for local restaurants on the DoorDash Marketplace.
As part of our #OpenforDelivery campaign, we launched “Local Restaurant Saturdays,” offering customers $0 delivery fees on all orders to local restaurants every Saturday in April. Through this effort, we helped drive over 1 million incremental deliveries. By popular demand from our local restaurant partners, we’re bringing back our “Local Restaurant” promotion every Saturday in the month of June to drive sales for local favorites on DoorDash.
To drive further demand for our restaurant partners, we’re also offering all DashPass subscribers 10% off their pickup orders in the month of June. We’ve seen pickup orders grow significantly over the past few months, and believe that offering this benefit to our most valuable users will accelerate that trend — generating more sales for restaurants at a lower cost, as commissions on pickup orders are typically significantly lower than commissions on delivery orders. On top of that, we’ll continue to invest in growing our Local Favorites carousels which feature a rotating selection of local restaurants and cuisines in your neighborhood to drive additional demand and discovery to the restaurants that make each city unique.
As we turn towards the future, the most important thing is to come together to help the restaurants that mean so much to our communities. Main Street Strong is our contribution, and this is just the beginning. We will continue to build out the program and will make more announcements in the coming months.
*Source: Internal DoorDash data; National Restaurant Association Industry Survey (April 2020); Facebook State of Small Business Report.
Announcing “Main Street Strong”: Our Commitment to Helping Restaurants On the Road to Recovery was originally published in DoorDash on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.