How DoorDash uses Marqeta’s Seamless Payments

From dinner to dessert

For years, if you lived in a large metropolitan area like Manhattan, you could get any type of cuisine delivered straight to your door. Step one mile into the suburbs, and your choices plummeted to national pizza brands and a few local options. Enter DoorDash in 2013, a last-mile logistics company empowering restaurants to grow their businesses by offering on-demand delivery, data-driven insights, and in-store efficiency. Today DoorDash is a rapidly growing on-demand food platform, with delivery service spanning metropolitan and suburban areas across all 50 U.S. states, Canada, and Australia.

Creating a wealth of food options for customers

Prior to DoorDash, it was difficult for restaurants to set up and operate on-demand delivery services efficiently. For the most part, high-end and specialty restaurants were designed to serve eat-in diners. DoorDash’s last-mile logistics platform changed that by connecting restaurants and consumers using cloud-based, platform services. For seamless payments, DoorDash partners with Marqeta to ensure restaurants in their network can deliver exceptional service for their customers across expanding geographies. DoorDash uses Marqeta’s platform for customer orders that require point-of-sale card payments at restaurants. With Marqeta’s modern payments technology, DoorDash can maintain operational quality with their ever-expanding restaurant selection — ensuring their delivery couriers, called Dashers, can count on the reliability of Marqeta’s technology to purchase and deliver great food on tight timelines for hungry consumers. 

“The relationship we have with Marqeta is a true partnership. They are a critical partner because their solution is mission critical for DoorDash. Without Marqeta’s platform and APIs there would be lots of use cases that we couldn’t serve. A lot of restaurants require payments at the point of sale, and Marqeta allows us to do that and serve the needs of our restaurants the way they would like to be served.”

– Mike Kim, VP Finance at DoorDash

Modern card issuing at scale

Marqeta powers DoorDash’s Red Card, the proprietary, instant-issue physical credit card that Dashers use to pay thousands of restaurants in three countries directly at the point of sale. Using Marqeta’s modern card issuing platform, DoorDash has the ability to control what is being purchased and to avoid fraudulent charges. When a Dasher pays for food with the DoorDash Red Card in a restaurant, the transaction is only approved and funded if the order and amount match the customer’s order in DoorDash’s system. This is the core of Marqeta’s Just-in-Time Funding, which has reduced fraud by a massive multiple for DoorDash. It also ensures that Dashers are purchasing and delivering the correct order to the consumer. Additionally, Marqeta helps DoorDash manage fraud using merchant category codes. Marqeta can whitelist or blacklist specific merchant category codes so that DoorDash is further protected from potentially fraudulent charges on the Red Card.

On the horizon

The Red Card will soon be available as a virtual card tokenized to digital wallets, making it even more seamless for Dashers to place and pay for orders over the phone and still deliver the right order to the right customer on time. 

Since DoorDash launched on the Marqeta platform, DoorDash has grown to over 4,000 cities in the U.S. Transactions have increased consistently, and DoorDash has expanded to Canada and Australia.

Learn how DoorDash drives massive economic growth with innovative payments for restaurants, Dashers, and consumers. Read the DoorDash case study here.