DoorDash announced today that is has launched a new pricing structure to deal with its historically controversial restaurant commission fees. Via these “Partnership Plans,” as the service calls them, U.S. restaurants can now choose between three different commission price points.
Plans are priced according to how much area a restaurant wants its delivery radius to cover and how much marketing it needs from DoorDash.
The DoorDash Basic plan has the smallest delivery radius and the highest cost for customers, since most of the delivery costs are shifted to them. The commission fee for restaurants with this plan is 15 percent. It does not include in-app marketing.
DoorDash Plus has a 25 percent commission fee, offers a bigger delivery radius, and includes the DashPass loyalty program. DoorDash Premier has the biggest delivery radius and, in addition to DashPass, also offers what it calls a “growth guarantee.” Via this feature, restaurants will be reimbursed their full commission for the month if they receive fewer than 20 orders for delivery, pickup, or DoorDash subsidiary Caviar.
DoorDash also announced a new and reduced commission fee for pickup orders, which is 6 percent across all plans.
The new tiered pricing structure is very clearly a response to the commission fee caps dozens of U.S. cities implemented last year. With dining rooms closed because of the COVID-19 pandemic, restaurants were forced to rely more heavily on third-party delivery services like DoorDash. We weren’t too many months into restaurant restrictions before many across the restaurant industry started to decry commission fees, which often go as high as 30 percent per transaction, as detrimental to restaurants’ bottom lines.
DoorDash and others oppose fee caps, saying they hurt order volumes and result in the service having to raise prices for customers.
Granted, with a plan like DoorDash Basic, customers will still pay more for their meals to be delivered. From the looks of it, bringing those costs down will mean hiking commission fees for restaurants back up, so it remains to be seen if this new pricing structure is truly beneficial for businesses or if it’s more of the same old story.
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