Is there a DoorDash delivery time Guarantee?

It’s easy to be pissed off when Doordash gives you a delivery time and ends up doubling it at the end of the day – we’ve seen it happen several times.

If you’re new to Doordash, you may want to know if the platform has a special delivery time guarantee, probably to get an incentive or a refund for the extra wait time they caused you.

Is there a DoorDash delivery time Guarantee?

If you’ve had experience ordering from pizza chains like Domino and Papa John’s in the old days, you sure know they always had a delivery time guarantee.

And the idea is simple and effective from a customer’s perspective — you make an order, then the company goes to give you an expected delivery time with a grace period.

If they fail to meet up the delivery time and exhaust the grace period, they have to either give you an incentive or make a full refund depending on the agreement of the company.

Basically, the idea is to compensate customers for late deliveries.

Many companies eventually ended up dropping this policy, with some still doing it perfectly. Take Dominos, for instance.

So, is Doordash in the league of these companies that have a delivery time guarantee?

Well, from a customer’s perspective, it isn’t.

Like most modern food delivery (say Ubereats, Deliveroo, etc.), Doordash doesn’t have a delivery time guarantee. Hence, customers are not necessarily compensated for late deliveries.

It’s worth mentioning that you can get refunded for an order, but only when it takes extremely long to get your order delivered after the wait time is exhausted.

In this case, you’ll need to navigate to the help section>delivery issue when you open the order, and you’ll find the “arrived late” button.

Tap on it, and provide the needed information.

It’s worth mentioning that this feature should only be used when your order is actually beyond the latest delivery time by Doordash, otherwise, you can get your account deactivated for false accusations.

And yes, Doordash does ban customers’ accounts.

Now while Doordash doesn’t necessarily have a delivery time guarantee, the company actually has a strict lateness policy for drivers, which involves the risk of deactivating their account, if they have a number of lateness violations or other mixed violations.

This is done to ensure faster deliveries.

But to be honest, there are just a whole number of factors that play into the delivery time of orders, that sometimes, can’t even be controlled.

Let’s take a look at these factors in the next section of the blog posts.

What Factors Affect how early Doordash delivery arrives?

While Doordash tries to make delivery as fast as it can, a lot could still go wrong, leading to a late delivery. Some of these factors can be controlled while others not.

So below are they:

The restaurant efficacy

In cases I’ve seen and experienced as a driver myself, restaurants usually contribute the most to delayed deliveries.

When you make an order on Doordash, the driver has the responsibility to drive to the restaurant, before getting to you.

However, if the driver drives to the restaurant and has to wait an extra 10 minutes, 15 minutes, or thereabout, before getting the order, your delivery time would definitely increase.

There are also some drivers that would instantly unassign a delivery, the moment they meet a restaurant crowded with customers or slow in making orders, as there’s no compensation for extra time spent.

In this case, Doordash would have to find a second driver, and this would lead to one of the popular statuses on Doordash, “Doordash is stuck on preparing order.”

In any of these scenarios, your delivery time would be heavily affected.

Traffic

Obviously, we can’t control traffic, however, it’s worth mentioning.

Even if DoorDash drivers use GPS services from Google to find the fastest routes, unpredictable traffic conditions or roadwork can still lead to delays.

For one reason, Google only makes its estimation for traffic based on historical events and not actually real-time.

A journey that might normally take 10 minutes can easily double or even triple in heavy traffic, hence increasing the delivery time on the app.

General Tips to get your Orders Delivered Faster on Doordash

We’ve done justice to the factors that affect delivery times, but what can you do to positively influence the delivery time of your order on Doordash? Well, here’s a list of them…

Order your food during non-peak times

Most food delivery companies including Doordash are flooded with customers during peak times of the day. Specifically, this is between 11 AM to 2 PM in the noon and 5 PM to 9 PM in the evening.

The problem with this is that there are more likely to be fewer drivers leading to time being wasted, searching for drivers, and busy restaurants, all due to the high level of orders during this period.

Hence, if you’re so concerned about time, it’s always best to order during non-peak hours.

Order from Closer restaurants

Even though you might not be able to accurately estimate delivery time, we all know the closer the restaurant, the faster the order arrives. If that makes a positive difference to your schedule, why not?

Thankfully, Doordash has features that let you easily do this.

Understand how delivery time work

It’s always best to have a personal safe prediction of how long an order you make on Doordash is expected to arrive regardless of what Doordash tells you.

This will not only manage your expectations but give you a better estimate, because we’ve personally Doordash being flawed, regardless of traffic and other uncontrollable factors that affect delivery time.

Generally, a good way to do this is to always add an extra 20%, 50%, or 100% to the estimated time Doordash makes.

Conclusion

While Doordash still tries to make deliveries delivered during the expected time range, there’s no such thing as a Delivery time guarantee on the platform, unless when the delivery time is way above the estimated time range.