Dive Brief:

• DoorDash added a feature on Wednesday that will track a customer’s location so that restaurants or merchants will be informed when the customer is arriving to pick up their order, according to a company blog post. The delivery platform added pickup in 2018.
• This feature is expected to reduce customers, who have to opt-in to sharing their location, from having to wait long on the curb for their orders to be ready. 
• DoorDash also found in a survey of 1,000 customers that 56% of customers increased the amount they ordered via takeout during the early days of the pandemic. Forty-four percent cited affordability as the top reason to use pickup and a vast majority (82%) said they would take their food home after picking up their orders.

Dive Insight:

Takeout and delivery received a huge boost during the last two months due to dining room closures, which led more restaurants to use self-delivery and/or partner with more third-party aggregators.

DoorDash quickly adapted its operations, adding thousands of merchants to pickup at no cost to them, reducing commissions for local restaurant partners with five or fewer locations by half through the end of May and defaulting all delivery orders with no-contact options for customers.

But competition still remains fierce and other providers are using new technologies and features during the outbreak. Postmates was an early adopter of non-contact delivery and rolled out a curbside pickup feature for merchants this week. While the curbside feature doesn’t track where the customer is located, they can check in to let the restaurant know the customer is outside waiting.

Geo-fencing for pickups is becoming increasingly popular for restaurants because it can help reduce wait times and streamline the pickup process, especially when it comes to curbside pickup. Panera rolled out geo-fenced curbside this week that allows customers who opt in to tap “I’m here” when they arrive.

While many of the geo-fenced features require customers to say they have arrived, DoorDash has a bit of an edge since it allows live tracking, giving restaurants more lead time to make sure orders are ready faster. This could help DoorDash maintain its market share, which reached 45% in April with the addition of Caviar, according to Edison Trends, which based its market share data on 2 million transactions.