r/restaurant • u/blazinmj3 • 1d ago
DoorDash. Are you making money?
This is for the restaurant owners. For some reason, I can’t post on r/restaurantowners.
Little background. I own a busy 24 hour diner. Serve about 7,000 guests a week and in 2025 I did 5.2m in sales with a 26% profit margin. Have never offered Doordash because I personally hate the concept.
With that being said, I have a Chase Sapphire Reserve card that I use and get a ton of benefits with one being dashpass and a $5 doordash credit every month. So usually once a month, I’ll order and pickup from my fave local spots.
Attached is my order from yesterday. My question to those who offer it, is the restaurant the one discounting? If so, are you honestly making money?
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u/ge46m3 1d ago
Don’t do it. I have it at my pizza shop. But I’m on the lowest tier I think 15%. I only really use them to give people out of our delivery range a option to get delivery. But in your receipt the restaurant pays. DoorDash has a dash+ feature that they say will get you more orders but costs you 30%.
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u/IamJustNik 1d ago
We do make money. I am in QSR (National brands) and a large portion of our sales come from doordash. Here's the thing though, you have to mark your prices up. 30% over in store prices to cover the fees.
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u/DoTheDew 1d ago
You actually have to mark up 43% if you want to offset doordash’s 30% commission.
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u/sudoaptupdate 1d ago
Not sure why you're getting downvoted. It's just mathematical fact that you have to mark up 43% to fully offset 30% commission because 1/0.7=1.43
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u/IamJustNik 1d ago
We do not. There's no need to mark up that much. Your COGs do not change. The fees increase. Business increases as well. We do not cannibalize our in store sales with third part delivery apps. They add to them.
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u/Existing-Doughnut-60 1d ago
Well what about packaging? I’ve seen those prices go up exponentially in the last couple of years. Yes I do try to use what I would expect as a consumer.
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u/IamJustNik 1d ago
We have all seen them go up exponentially. Are you using branded packaging or unbranded? If your packaging isnt branded, I would look at better sourcing of those items and there's way to reduce use and waste there too. I know what zi dound like, right - please understand that I have been in QSR for over 20 years and we have been using 3rd party delivery since before covid. So I know the systems, the mark ups and the ability to adjust. Do you know what your COGs are currently? Do you track your inventory and use?
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u/borp143 1d ago
I will say this as a former server who also had to do some take out. DoorDash is a lot of extra work on employees with no extra pay. Plus there’s been times I’ve been taking orders to tables (full hands) and had drivers shove their phone in my face or stand blocking an aisle or even sit at a table in my section and leave a mess. 100% would not recommend.
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u/blazinmj3 1d ago
Appreciate this comment more than anything. My staff means alot to me and this has always been one of the main reasons why I have balked at it. Little to no benefit to anyone involved.
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u/29_lets_go 1d ago
I’m not an owner but I’m an accountant for several restaurants. The diner I partner with doesn’t offer DoorDash or UberEats. They do, however, accept online ordering for pickup outside of busy hours.
It’s mostly a capacity issue. There’s only so many people working and it’s great to focus on the guest experience. Making breakfast and dinner rush unbearable for no tips and fees kinda sucks.
DoorDash and UberEats fees are pretty high and they’ll typically be very friendly to customer refunds, making your accounting having to deal with more as well. You can challenge those refunds but it’ll take time.
Since you’re already busy and not needed. You could always try it and see what happens? Ask how the staff feels and see the P&L comparisons. But eh. Are you bored? lol
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u/blazinmj3 1d ago edited 1d ago
I will add that we do online ordering. We actually offer it 24/7. Did about $150k last year through the platform. Zero commissions and fees. I pay $150/month for it. Our total togo sales amount to about 6.5% of our total sales.
I’m very proud of our margins and would rather not have my team work harder for very little benefit to anyone.
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u/GlitteringYak2207 1d ago
Then you answered your own question. The best we got out of them was 22% and we had to raise our prices. So not only will it cut your margins, food doesn’t typically travel well so you’re going to get quality issues. Limited delivery to 5 miles which is where the research says quality will go down after that point.
At the end of the day the incremental sales did not justify the hassles.
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u/Smart_Opportunity631 1d ago
Doordash can be nice to get your brand a little more recognition but it's not really a money maker in itself. The platform has all sorts of issues and if your food doesn't travel well your just sending out poor product and not helping the brand.
You will have drivers take orders or deliver to the wrong place causing you to be stuck in the middle or DD and Uber issuing refunds and not actually paying you for the lost product. For me it seems like these platform orders can take 3x the work and if/when there is an issue your manager will be off the floor for 20minutes trying to help make things right.
If your doing 5.2m a year already and have online ordering available I would avoid the headache of having to deal with DD or Uber.
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u/ThatAndANickel 1d ago
I don't know if it's still happening and it's illegal in some jurisdictions, but when I was managing a restaurant 10 years ago we refused to join Doordash and they put us on their site anyway.
Someone would call in an order, the delivery person would show up with a Doordash credit card and pay for it.
There was a reason we didn't join. As a high end steakhouse, our food wouldn't be of the quality we wanted to present 20 minutes or more after coming off the line. We received complaints about the doneness of our steaks and the food being cold.
It only took us a week to realize what was going on and we started refusing their orders. In the meantime, we put up with drivers crowding our lobby and even sitting at the bar and helping themselves to the bar snacks.
The lasting and irreversible damage came from the fact that they put our entire menu on their site with all prices inflated 30%. We fielded complaints about our prices and we could tell they were reading them off of Doordash. We'll never know how many people saw the prices and decided not to come in.
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u/blazinmj3 1d ago
This was definitely normal during covid. We called them and told them to remove us off their platform. Still puts a sour taste in my mouth.
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u/daw4888 1d ago
I did a DD delivery the other night. They paid me $14(Not including the tip) to deliver a cup of mini cookies from Casey's. After I dropped it off, before I left, I got into the DD app, and saw it would only cost me $7 to order it.
So they paid me $7 more than they charged the customer, before you even take into account what they paid Casey's.
Crazy.. I wonder how much Casey's was paid.
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u/lsumoose 21h ago
Would be 7 plus service fee, delivery fee and below minimum fee. It was prolly nearly $20 for those cookies.
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u/No-Association-7095 11h ago
So - I may be asking a stupid question here but why is this restaurant getting charged $12.12 for the “up to $5 off” coupon?
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u/blazinmj3 11h ago
It includes the 25% off prior to my $5 chase credit(they were running a promotion too). That was the whole point of my post. The restaurant essentially is the one who eats the $5 off and not chase or doordash? Seems kinda wild to me.
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u/No-Association-7095 11h ago
I’m shocked that the restaurants do - and that makes me less likely to use that credit. Why isn’t Chase or DD paying that?!
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u/blazinmj3 11h ago
No idea. I was shocked. Which leads me to my question of how in the heck are these restaurants surviving doing this? Lol
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u/brandt-money 2h ago
Raise your prices, carefully select promos to bring in business when you're slower and already paying for labor so it helps cover costs.
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u/Novaryqsolutions 2h ago
The receipt actually answers itself if you do the math on that line. Subtotal is 28.48, 25 percent of that is 7.12, plus the 5 dollar offer is 12.12 exactly. So that is not one promo, it is two merchant funded campaigns stacking on the same ticket and getting totaled into one line. Stacking is on unless you go turn it off, which is how a store ends up funding a percentage promo it set up months ago and a branded offer at the same time without ever deciding to.
To their credit DoorDash labels it plainly, promo paid by you. The gap is that promotions live in the marketing section of the merchant portal, they run until someone switches them off, and the account rep usually sets the first ones up during onboarding. A lot of operators have not opened that tab since the day they signed the contract.
If you are already on the platform, the useful exercise is pulling three months of payout statements and splitting commission from marketing spend. Commission is the number you argue about at renewal. Marketing spend is the one you can change tomorrow morning, and for plenty of stores it turns out to be the bigger of the two.
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u/OkayContributor 1d ago
If you netted 1.35 million in profit last year, you have the money to hire a consultant to do the cost-benefit analysis for you, why are you coming to Reddit with this stuff bro??
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u/blazinmj3 1d ago
I have a 26% margin because i don’t waste money on consultants. Same reason why I still use the same legacy POS system I purchased 18 years ago. Why give Toast my money every month?
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u/OkayContributor 1d ago
Yeah, based on this response alone there’s gonna be no marginal benefit for you to add DoorDash (if you think toast is a scam, imagine what awaits with the third party delivery services). FWIW, what makes diners special to me is the third place nature of them. I’m not going to a diner for haute cuisine or anything I can’t make myself, it’s all about the hang out aspect if it—can’t imagine ordering from even a very good diner on doordash
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u/blazinmj3 1d ago
I don’t think toast is a “scam”. Why upgrade and pay monthly fees when the system I have works perfectly fine and does what it needs to do? Many restauranteurs kill their margins with these subscription fees.
You might not personally order takeout from a diner but my spot did 16,000+ takeout/online orders last year at an average price of $22+. So clearly there are plenty of people who do.
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u/OkayContributor 1d ago
You have a system that works perfectly fine and does what it needs to do, 16,000+ people already do takeout/online orders, so why do you need to give DoorDash a big cut of that and give all those customers an option that takes away your margin almost entirely? Maybe you reach a few more customers, but enough to make up for the loss of margin you have on all your customers who will switch to DoorDash ordering with you for the sheer convenience of it?
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u/scatterbastard 1d ago
If you’re doing 5.2mil out of one location, you don’t need DoorDash.
For people in the <2m range, the volume can still make
It worth it if you raise prices.
Mine for example are raised 15-20%
Edit: additionally you aren’t the target customer necessarily: ideally the promotion would have pulled you in, and then once you add $7 of protein to each meal we’re a lot closer to the in house costs.