Marketplace Briefing: How DoorDash is winning over apparel brands
This is the latest installment of the Marketplace Briefing, a weekly Modern Retail+ column about the ever-changing e-commerce marketplace landscape. More from the series →
Nowadays, DoorDash drivers aren’t just delivering takeout. Many couriers, known as “Dashers,” are now dropping off everything from sneakers to last-minute outfits as the company pushes deeper into retail.
DoorDash, the largest food delivery service in the U.S., announced in late March that it would add the apparel brands Urban Outfitters, Steve Madden, Dolce Vita and Rally House to its marketplace, the company’s latest move beyond food and grocery delivery.
The new apparel partnerships add to DoorDash’s growing roster of non-restaurant partners. With retail delivery, the company is trying to get ahead of rivals like Amazon, which continues to raise the bar on speed and selection, as well as Walmart and Instacart, which have expanded their own delivery capabilities. The move also builds on earlier deals with retailers like Foot Locker and reflects a broader effort to broaden its assortment and strengthen its role as a logistics partner for retailers.
DoorDash works with more than 150,000 non-restaurant retailers on its platform, up from 115,000 in 2024. Some of DoorDash’s biggest non-restaurant retail partners include Best Buy, Lowe’s and Petco. More than 30% of customers buy across categories, according to the company.
“We’ve always envisioned connecting the entire neighborhood,” Mike Goldblatt, VP of enterprise sales and business development for grocery and retail at DoorDash, said in an interview with Modern Retail at Shoptalk Spring.
DoorDash’s foray into retail deliveries appears to be paying off. The company said in February it expects gross order value to be $31 billion to $31.8 billion in the period ending in March, beating Wall Street estimates. In the fourth quarter, gross order value jumped 39% year over year.
More retailers are realizing that shipping from stores can get products to customers faster and at a lower cost than using warehouses and distribution centers. PetSmart, one of DoorDash’s retail partners, previously told Modern Retail it now fulfills more than 90% of online orders from its roughly 1,700 store locations. Similarly, Dick’s Sporting Goods, another DoorDash partner, said at the National Retail Federation conference in January that it fulfills about 80% of online orders from its 900 stores.
For Mike Goldblatt, DoorDash’s VP of enterprise sales and business development for grocery and retail, the expansion is a natural extension of the company’s original vision. In an interview, he described how DoorDash has evolved from a restaurant delivery service into a platform designed to connect consumers with all types of local merchants, and why apparel represents the next frontier in that strategy. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
How do you define the company’s enterprise strategy today?
“Our vision at DoorDash — and I should say Tony [Xu]’s vision as the founder — has always been to connect local commerce and local businesses to the neighborhood. The reason it’s called DoorDash and not something with ‘food’ in the name is that his vision was always to connect the entire local neighborhood with the consumers in that neighborhood.
I joined the company seven years ago to help start the grocery and retail business. We started with restaurants, obviously, and if you can deliver food within 30 minutes, it becomes a lot easier to deliver grocery and retail in 30–45 minutes or an hour.
We started in retail about five years ago, delivering on behalf of retailers on their own websites. There are many retailers where we deliver orders placed on [retailer].com as well as on our marketplace. It was probably about three years ago that we really started powering fast retail delivery and bringing incremental consumers to retailers on the DoorDash marketplace.
So our vision, broadly, is: How can we drive incremental sales for retailers, connect them to the consumer and help them grow their business, whether that’s on the marketplace or on their first-party channel?”
On average, how much is DoorDash is able to drive incremental sales for its retail partners?
“We’ve shared this especially in the grocery vertical, but it’s really a truism across the ecosystem: Typically, 70-90% of sales on our marketplace are incremental. I think that’s one of the big reasons retailers are increasingly interested in that channel, because it’s incremental sales.”
Why was now the right time to partner with Urban Outfitters, Dolce Vita, Rally House and Steve Madden?
“As we go to market, we’re looking first for brands we think will resonate with our consumer base and that we know we can drive incremental demand to. We know people are searching for those brands. We can see that in what we call “null search” data, when someone searches for something from Urban Outfitters and it’s not on DoorDash. That tells us there’s latent demand, and then we’ll have those conversations and try to get those brands live on the platform.
The second piece is behavior on the platform. Take Dick’s Sporting Goods as an example. It’s a sporting goods retailer, but when you look at purchases from Dick’s, you see people buying socks, shorts, T‑shirts. So you know there’s demand for apparel within a retailer that isn’t primarily known as an “apparel” retailer, but where apparel purchases are already happening on DoorDash.
So you can triangulate those two points: what’s being searched for that doesn’t exist yet and what behavior is already happening on the platform, and then figure out how to give consumers more of what they’re looking for.”
How did you get the DoorDash platform ready for apparel brands?
“With apparel, there are some nuances we all know as shoppers about the apparel experience. If you think about grocery or even pets, the way the UI exists on DoorDash is relatively straightforward. It’s complicated, but it doesn’t have 12 different sizes and 14 different colors. So we’ve been doing a lot of work to, let’s call it, uplevel the shopping experience to be ready for apparel. That work is never really “done” — it’s always evolving — but we’re now ready to execute well in apparel. We’ve been talking to apparel partners for the last year and a half, and you’re starting to see some of those brands join the platform.
If you open the DoorDash app to shop, you’ll see this: variants in sizes and colors. The last thing you want, if you’re trying to buy a white shirt, is to scroll through 75 versions of the same SKU that are just slightly different sizes or tones. So we’ve been building the experience so it’s one shirt, and then you can click in and see all the variants.”
Why would a consumer want to purchase an item from DoorDash’s platform as opposed to a retailer’s website?
“Travel is a great example: You forgot your AirPods, your charging cord, your toothbrush, the white shirt — you forgot something. And then you realize, ‘Oh, DoorDash might have this.’ We see a lot of discovery happening in those ‘oh no’ moments, and that often becomes the first trial. Once you’ve had that first ‘oh no’ experience and solved it with DoorDash, you understand that this broader ecosystem exists on the platform, and that’s when we start to see more frequent usage.”
How do you decide which retail categories to prioritize as you expand the marketplace? And how do you decide that a particular retailer is a good fit for the marketplace?
“Selection is paramount for us. I wouldn’t say beauty is more important than home improvement or pets. For consumers like you and me, on any given day, you might need something different. My middle daughter has a lizard, and pretty frequently, we’re ordering crickets from PetSmart, so it just depends on the customer’s need in that moment.
We’re talking to retailers across every category about what they need. I wouldn’t say there’s a strict prioritization in how we think about the world. We just want to connect the entire neighborhood to the consumer. We probably started in pets because it was closer to food, so from a consumer mental model it was an easier way to get the flywheel rolling. And now DoorDash is known for footwear, beauty, home improvement. You name it, we’re covering the gamut.”
What have you learned from building out grocery delivery that you’re now applying to your latest retail and apparel partnerships?
“Consumers don’t want things slower. We’re now delivering over 500,000 retail products within an hour. We see essentially no limit to consumer demand for getting what they need quickly, whether it’s an ‘oh no, I ran out of X’ or ‘I forgot Y.’ That cuts across all categories.
The second big theme is affordability. The economy is what it is, so there’s always a need to be as affordable as we can, which is partly a function of how retailers price. That’s also why we have our DashPass program, so we can drive delivery-fee savings with free delivery. I’d say speed and affordability are the two big ones.”
What I’m reading
- Amazon is preparing to launch its own version of Samsung’s art TV, The Frame. (Bloomberg)
- OpenAI is planning new pricing for ChatGPT ads. (The Information)
- OpenAI touts the company’s partnership with Amazon in a memo to staffers. (CNBC)