Dive Brief:

• DoorDash unveiled Self-Serve Integration Onboarding Tuesday, allowing select restaurant partners to join DoorDash’s marketplace in days directly through point-of-sales platforms ItsaCheckmate and Deliverect, the company wrote in a blog post.
• DoorDash estimates four out of five restaurants that use ItsaCheckmate and Deliverect will be able to onboard without direct interaction with an onboarding representative. 
• The launch of this tool comes weeks after DoorDash rolled out the largest app update in its history alongside several additional tools for merchants, including store rewards to offer loyal customers.

Dive Insight:

In addition to making DoorDash more competitive, the integration is expected to reduce onboarding time for restaurants by up to 86%, DoorDash said. Restaurants that join the platform through these providers will then be able to manage orders and menu updates directly. DoorDash said it plans to add more POS providers to the onboarding platform. 

DoorDash’s integration with POS providers will likely draw in additional restaurant partners, and could boost customer frequency. POS integrations may help improve order accuracy, as well, because they allow orders to be sent directly to restaurants instead of to a tablet that an employee needs to input into the POS.

Between juggling on-premise dining and off-premise operations, restaurateurs are strapped for time and often don’t have additional resources to devote to troubleshooting onboarding,” said Ruth Isenstadt, head of US restaurants at DoorDash. “Partnering with ItsaCheckmate and Deliverect to enable thousands of restaurants to start connecting with customers on DoorDash quickly is one way we’re innovating to set an even stronger foundation for early days on our platform.”

DoorDash has invested heavily in providing more tools and support for merchants as well as reducing friction on its marketplace, according to its Q1 investor letter. In the 12 months through March 2023, it “spent over $13 billion on research and development, sales and marketing, and direct costs associated with processing, fulfilling and supporting orders.” Its investments in making marketplaces more seamless have already begun to pay off, according to the company. During Q1 2023, the company said its marketplaces generated double-digit same-store sales for restaurants. DoorDash Marketplaces has generated nearly $100 billion in sales since 2020.  

Other delivery platforms have also invested in integrations to help merchant partners. Last year, Uber Eats partnered with Toast and Clover to allow restaurants to join its platform through the POS providers. As part of Grubhub’s latest update to Direct, its commission-free branded ordering channel for independents, it integrated with Google, allowing partners to add their Direct websites to Google Business profiles.