By: Zach Heerwagen, Director & General Manager, Incumbents
Core to our founding mission at DoorDash is a vision to help restaurants and merchants thrive in the online economy. Over the past seven years of working alongside Fast Casual leaders, mom and pop shops and fine-dining restaurants, we’ve pushed ourselves to create a menu of offerings that work for each unique restaurant’s business needs. Some restaurants want help establishing an eCommerce store while others are looking to fulfill their online channel’s orders, and some may want help doing both. For all of these requests and more, especially during this unprecedented time when we know that every order counts, we hope to provide restaurants with the choice and flexibility to build a permanent and sustainable online presence that works for their business.
In continuation of that mission, today we’re excited to introduce DoorDash Self-Delivery, a product for the restaurant who wishes to use their own in-house delivery staff. Self-Delivery enables restaurants to increase takeout sales and access new customers in their area by listing themselves on the DoorDash and/or Caviar marketplace while continuing to fulfill orders with their in-house fleet.
Many restaurants have worked hard to build their own delivery offering, preferring to offer delivery in-house in order to better own the end-to-end customer experience or to create new opportunities for their existing staff. According to DoorDash data, an estimated 120,000 restaurants today offer in-house delivery, and with Self-Delivery, restaurants can continue to use their own fleets, create new opportunities for their employees, and benefit from the added visibility of the DoorDash platform.
How does Self-Delivery work?
- Interested restaurants can fill out this form and will be able to start accepting orders within a few weeks time
- Restaurants then set a delivery zone and price customer delivery fees according to what works for their business
- Once the account is activated, customers can browse the menu and place orders just like any other merchant on the DoorDash app or website. Orders will appear on a restaurant’s POS, portal, or tablet, with 100% of tips passed through to the Merchant to distribute to its delivery fleet
- Restaurants who sign up with Self-Delivery can also pair with DoorDash’s other products including DashPass, Pickup and Drive
Coinciding with this product launch, we’re extremely excited to welcome Jimmy John’s to the DoorDash platform. Using Self-Delivery, Jimmy John’s will add more than 2,400 restaurant locations to the DoorDash marketplace while continuing to fulfill all delivery orders with Jimmy John’s drivers in house. After a successful six-month pilot with more than 100 restaurants, Jimmy John’s chose to expand its relationship with DoorDash chain-wide, due to its customer base, the strength of DoorDash’s existing relationships with other brands within Inspire’s family of brands, and its willingness to build a Self-Delivery model that could seamlessly integrate incremental DoorDash volume with Jimmy John’s existing delivery network. Read more on our new partnership here.
Other local and national restaurants such as Panera, Lou Malnati’s Pizzeria in Chicago and Healthy Garden & Gourmet Pizza in New Jersey are also early adopters of the DoorDash Self-Delivery product.
“We’ve been a delivery company for decades. Delivery is something that’s a core competency of ours and it didn’t make a lot of sense for us to be signing up with a partner and pass off something we did well, which is why Self-Delivery made all the sense in the world for our business. With this product we can reach an audience that is totally different than our own and grow our sales incrementally. But the real benefit for us is that through leveraging our own drivers and driver platform we can increase same-store efficiencies and ensure the end customer experience is the same across the board.” — Ben Beckstrom, CIO, Lou Malnati’s
Interested restaurants can sign up at https://get.doordash.com/products/self-delivery. DoorDash Self-Delivery is available to restaurants in the U.S., Canada and Australia, and new restaurant partners will receive a free trial of Self-Delivery for 60 days commission free.
A New Way to Partner with DoorDash: Introducing ‘Self-Delivery’ was originally published in DoorDash on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.