DoorDash Must Deliver in a Tougher Consumer Market

Like other restaurant and grocery delivery services, DoorDash is seeing the impact of softer consumer spending.

Although the company raised its fiscal 2022 outlook for marketplace gross over value, management also stated that the third quarter and full year were likely to reflect reduced consumer spending compared with the first half of the year. 

On the plus side, the company’s recent acquisition of Wolt, part of its strategy to expand internationally, is having a positive impact.

“When viewing Doordash and Wolt’s combined desktop unique visits, a proxy for overall total orders, we are seeing a strong acceleration after many quarters of consecutive contractions,” said Hali Levine, an analyst with the Similarweb Investor Intelligence team.

Key takeaways

• Web traffic to doordash.com was up, but by only incrementally – visits for the quarter were up 1% to nearly 198 million, according to Similarweb estimates. However, the daily active user count for the DoorDash Android app was up 5.3%, according to Similarweb estimates.
• DoorDash is a leading recipient of organic web traffic driven by terms related to food delivery, drawing nearly 13% of that traffic worldwide and 15.8% from within the U.S. in the latest quarter. 
• Despite lagging grubhub.com in organic search traffic, in September doordash.com led in overall traffic with 64.5 million visits to 23 million for grubhub.com, worldwide, or 58.3 million to 22.8 million in the U.S. Grubhub is part of the international network of delivery services owned by Just Eat Takeaway.
• DoorDash is expanding internationally with its recently completed acquisition of Finland’s Wolt, which has shown strong growth in competition with players like Just Eat Takeaway (see related report). Worldwide visits to wolt.com were up 25.7% in September.

Looking internationally for growth

DoorDash leads the food delivery market in the U.S. and is looking internationally for growth, building on the acquisition of Wolt, which closed in 2Q. Wolt currently operates in 23 countries, including the Czech Republic, Finland, and Germany, where its websites have all gained search traffic share for “food delivery” over the past 12 months.

While not immune to economic pressures, Wolt continues to grow traffic while DoorDash web traffic growth is at a standstill.

Wolt has a strong growth trajectory and gives DoorDash a play in the European market.

App traction

Many customers interact with DoorDash through their mobile phones, and the daily active user count for the DoorDash Android app was up 5.3% year-over-year in September, according to Similarweb estimates.

Strong market leadership in the U.S.

DoorDash’s international expansion will be important as it competes with Just Eat Takeaway, which is strong in Europe and internationally, but meanwhile, DoorDash retains an impressive market share lead in the U.S.

Grubhub, a U.S.-based pioneer in online food delivery that Just Eat Takeaway acquired in 2021, recently scored a distribution partnership with Amazon. Grubhub also leads in search traffic related to keywords like “food delivery.”

“Food delivery” search, U.S.

So far, however, Grubhub has not converted those advantages into a significant increase in traffic. UberEats has been advertising heavily and its traffic is climbing but still a fraction of what DoorDash enjoys.

In September, doordash.com received 58.3 million visits compared with 22.8 million for grubhub.com and 16.1 million for ubereats.com from within the U.S. Grubhub also does business as seamless.com, which attracted another 4.4 million visits in September in the U.S.

The Similarweb Insights & Communications team is available to pull additional or updated data on request for the news media (journalists are invited to write to press@similarweb.com). When citing our data, please reference Similarweb as the source and link back to the most relevant blog post or similarweb.com/blog/insights/.

Methodology

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Photo by Erik Mclean on Unsplash

by David F. Carr

David covers social media, digital advertising, and generative AI. With a background in web trends since the 1990s, he’s also the author of "Social Collaboration for Dummies".