DoorDash and Edible Team to Capture Consumers’ Gift Spending

DoorDash, in its ongoing effort to find and create new occasions for on-demand delivery, is increasing its gifting options.

The aggregator announced Thursday (June 8) a partnership with Edible, the company known for its giftable arrangements of fruits and sweets, to offer on-demand delivery from nearly 1,000 of the latter’s locations.

The move comes as part of DoorDash’s ongoing push to drive sales during gift-giving occasions. In 2020, the company launched its Gifting feature to enable consumers to send items to others with animated digital cards. Plus, this past holiday season, the aggregator debuted giftable subscriptions, making it possible for consumers to purchase three-, six- or 12-month DashPass memberships for others.

Overall, DoorDash is looking to build out its nonrestaurant offerings, encouraging consumers to use the platform for their day-to-day needs and driving more value out of its existing network of drivers.

In the aggregator’s shareholder letter accompanying its first quarter 2023 financial results, co-written by DoorDash Co-Founder, CEO and Board Chair Tony Xu and CFO Ravi Inukonda, the company noted improvements to its new verticals business in terms of both the quality of the service and the efficiency.

“These improvements are helping Dashers fulfill orders more consistently and more efficiently, and making it easier and more effective for merchants to leverage our platform, which attracts more merchants,” Xu and Inukonda wrote. “Quality improvements also increase value for consumers, which we believe is contributing to growing cohort level order frequency in our nonrestaurant categories.”

The aggregator is kicking off the partnership with a limited-time 30% off deal, a key move for driving adoption as gift shoppers increasingly seek deals amid inflation. Research from PYMNTS’ holiday season 2022 study “New Reality Check: The Paycheck-to-Paycheck Report: Holiday Shopping Edition,” created in collaboration with LendingClub, which drew from a survey of more than 3,400 U.S. consumers, revealed that 60% cited discounts or sales as important factors determining where they would shop during the season.

This move comes as aggregators race to capture new occasions for on-demand delivery. Competitor Grubhub, for its part, announced Thursday that it is partnering with extended-stay chain Homewood Suites by Hilton to offer delivery at close to 500 locations.

Uber Eats, for its part, is focused on building out its grocery business.

“We are introducing the native grocery experience to a much larger audience across the company, and as we have done that, we have seen the percentage of Uber Eats customers who then order from New Verticals increase nicely,” Uber CEO Dara Khosrowshahi told analysts on the company’s earnings call last month. “As we add selection, as experience continues to improve, those Eats customers who use New Verticals are going to be happy and they’re going to come back. So, the trend here is positive, but we have a very long way to go.”

For all these efforts, DoorDash retains the lead as the top aggregator in the United States. PYMNTS’ Provider Ranking of Aggregators, which ranks restaurant and grocery delivery marketplaces around the world based on a range of factors, including channel coverage, up-to-date downloads, monthly average users, sessions per user and average session length, places DoorDash at No. 1, with Uber Eats sitting at No. 2. Grubhub, meanwhile, is down at No. 13.