DoorDash is letting customers in the U.S. apply to place orders by sending a text message rather than tapping through the app, the company said. The feature is opening as a beta, and users have to apply by joining a waitlist at doordash.com/text.
The idea is to skip menus and browsing entirely. A customer texts what they want, and DoorDash searches nearby restaurants, reads their menus, and proposes a cart before handling checkout inside the same text thread. The company says the system learns individual habits over time, so a message like "order my usual" can pull up a regular Friday night order without spelling out dishes, modifiers, or the restaurant. It can also handle mixed dietary preferences and different quantities for group orders.
Text ordering builds on Ask DoorDash, the in-app assistant DoorDash introduced earlier. In the three months since that launch, the company says users have found more than 40,000 new restaurants through it, and nearly half of Ask DoorDash restaurant orders went to local spots the customer had never tried. DoorDash says more than 800,000 menu items and grocery products are available to an average person in the U.S. on its platform.
Alongside the text beta, DoorDash is adding grocery features inside the app. On a preferred grocer's store page, a prompt now lets shoppers reorder their usual items, and a single tap builds the cart; items can be swapped out or added before checkout. When a cart is built by asking DoorDash, the system checks that store's shelves in real time for cheaper equivalents and totals the potential savings before checkout, which the customer can accept or decline.
DoorDash says grocery baskets built with Ask DoorDash come together five times faster, and that those baskets average nearly 50% higher value and about 60% more unique items than the same customers' traditional orders. More than 30% of grocery orders through Ask DoorDash are routine restocks, according to the company.
"Managing tasks like ordering lunch or groceries shouldn't feel like work," said Andy Fang, co-founder of DoorDash. "We built a personal shopper that helps you discover and compare thousands of items while identifying ways for you to save on DoorDash."
The announcement does not say when the text beta will open to everyone on the waitlist, how many people will be admitted, or whether the feature will cost anything extra. DoorDash says it plans to extend the same speed and personalization to more household tasks over time, without naming which ones.
