DoorDash beats Q3 estimates, announces partnership with Lyft

DoorDash announced another strong financial quarter Wednesday with an 18% year-over-year increase in total orders to 643 million, and a 19% increase on the total dollar value of its orders to $20 billion. 

The San Francisco, Calif.-based delivery company also beat consensus earnings estimates, reporting $0.38 per share on $2.7 billion in revenue — a 25% year-over-year increase for the quarter. That’s substantially higher than consensus estimates of $0.21 per share on $2.66 billion, according to EarningsWhispers.com. 

DoorDash CEO Tony Xu said the company is “pretty excited about what we’re seeing in grocery.” 

When DoorDash launched grocery delivery four years ago, “we were replenishing that middle-of-the-week run, where you run out of the items that you consumed the most often…” Xu said. 

“I think what that spurred was both an introduction that was easy to understand for consumers, and also something that grocers hadn't seen before, and made it very easy to onboard a lot of these grocers,” he said. 

Xu also discussed DoorDash’s new partnership with San Francisco-based rideshare company Lyft, which DoorDash also announced Wednesday. 

That partnership opens up Lyft users and DoorDash users to benefits from both companies, including 5% off on-demand Lyft rides and 10% off scheduled airport rides (up to four per month combined), two priority pickup upgrades a month, and a three-month free trial membership to DashPass, the delivery service’s loyalty program. 

The new partnership comes about six months after DoorDash’s biggest competitor, Instacart, joined with Uber Eats, adding a restaurants tab to the Instacart app and online portal that gives shoppers access to thousands of restaurants.

DoorDash’s new partnership with the rideshare company follows other relationships the delivery company has built over the last year. 

In August, DoorDash expanded its partnership with Chase, offering DoorDash benefits to select Chase credit card holders. In September, DoorDash announced a partnership with Max streaming service, offering Max with Ads for members of the delivery company’s loyalty program, DashPass.

“I think it's a great opportunity for us to continue to add engagement to the DashPass program, as well as new DashPass members, and in return, Lyft gets access to the largest local commerce platform that sees the highest frequency program of its kind when it comes to consumer membership programs,” Xu said in the earnings call. 

DoorDash Chief Financial Officer Ravi Inukonda added that during the third quarter, DoorDash hit a new milestone of more than 18 million DashPass members. 

“They're everywhere. We're not differentiating between urban and suburban. We see strength across the board, which you see in the overall share gains that we had in the quarter as well,” Inukonda said. 

Xu also discussed the prospect of using autonomous vehicles for delivery, a fledgling technology that DoorDash has been researching since 2017, he said. 

“When you don't have a passenger who can just easily go in and come out of the vehicle, and you have to actually load and unload the vehicle when it comes to item delivery, that last 10 feet is actually quite tricky,” he said.