5 Biggest Customer Complaints About DoorDash

It used to be that when you'd want food delivered, you had to choose an eatery that offered that option itself. And, more often than not, that meant either pizza or Chinese food. But third-party delivery services like DoorDash changed all that, letting you have food — and various non-edible products — brought to your door without the need for the business to offer in-house delivery. It opened up a whole new world of home dining options for consumers, but restaurant delivery orders have also brought a number of customer complaints and frustrations.

This won't be about foods that aren't ideal for delivery, as that isn't really a DoorDash problem. If you want to roll the dice on having, say, steak and eggs delivered to your house, DoorDash isn't going to talk you out of it (nor should it). Instead, these are commonly cited issues with DoorDash as a service, across every step of the process from initially placing the order to receiving the food. And to that point, as this is Tasting Table, all of these complaints will either be about DoorDash food delivery specifically or will at least apply to food delivery.  

Everyone knows they are going to have to pay more to have food delivered to them than to dine in or pick it up themselves. Those elevated prices are going to be even higher when using DoorDash, as it's a third-party service that involves commissions the restaurant pays to DoorDash. But restaurants aren't going to just eat that commission — they are going to bake it into what they charge the customer to make up for it, despite DoorDash's attempts to discourage the practice. And that's where things get expensive.

Even among those who expect those inflated prices, there is a huge sense of sticker shock when that order total pops up on the DoorDash app. "I knew they inflated the prices on the app, but it couldn't be that bad...right?" began one Reddit post on the subject. So the poster did a test to see how ordering directly from the restaurant's website compared to the same order through DoorDash. "I paid $50.51; had I used DD it would have come to $77.68 BEFORE tip. They inflated the prices by FIFTY-FOUR PERCENT," the Redditor reported. 

The replies were a chorus of similar stories and matched outrage. An expletive of shock we can't repeat here set the tone for their reply: "I just went to the McDonald's app & did: 2 chicken McGriddles & medium Dr Pepper. $8. Doordash: $24.60 before tip. And that's from the location 1.5 miles away," one person wrote. 

So you've placed your DoorDash order. Now you need to wait for a dasher to actually go and get it — and that's where the problems can begin. Take this Reddit horror story, for instance: "I'm currently on my 2nd attempt at ordering tonight. With the first restaurant I ended up waiting for over an hour with 3 different dashers 'waiting for order' just to eventually go back to showing that there was no dasher assigned." A user asked on Quora why this happens, and someone claiming to be a dasher said that they are under no obligation to take orders and will sometimes pass on an order if it doesn't make financial sense for them to take it.

Unfortunately, having your order actually picked up is only half the battle. Now, it actually needs to make its way to your house. In general, people will begin to lose patience with food delivery once it's taken more than half an hour to arrive. And people seem to frequently get impatient with how long their DoorDash takes to get there. "My order was late because DoorDash sent the driver to another fast food joint to do an order there while having mine in with him," wrote one reviewer on DoorDash's Trustpilot page. "On numerous occasions, food was delivered late and arrives cold," wrote another user on Trustpilot.

Everyone makes mistakes. Just like there are common mistakes everyone makes when placing a delivery order, the people who are preparing and delivering your order are likewise not perfect. The average person tends to have a certain amount of patience and understanding when it comes to the occasional DoorDash mistake. It's when mistakes are a common occurrence that customers stop being so understanding — and that seems to be the case with DoorDash delivery.

Mistakes with the food itself are tough to blame on dashers, as they just show up and grab the already prepared and bagged-up order to bring to you. But people have had plenty of issues with all of the steps along the chain that DoorDash is responsible for. A question asked in a Facebook community called Doordash Customer Group asked, "why do dashers frequently deliver wrong orders?" and claimed they receive someone else's order "80 to 85 percent of the time." Another post in the group complained of "almost non-stop issues with DoorDash deliveries." 

Reddit is host to many similar threads. One post asked "How often is your order wrong?" which got several replies of botched deliveries. One person said they ordered from Slim Chickens but got food from Chipotle instead — not even remotely the same menu items –rf4 which would definitely be DoorDash's mistake and not that of either restaurant. 

In a 2019 survey conducted by U.S. Foods, 28% of the 497 delivery drivers surveyed admitted to taking food from a customer's order at some point. The survey is nearly seven years old and included drivers from multiple delivery apps, so it doesn't tell us how common the practice is among DoorDash drivers today. Still, customers have recently reported similar incidents involving Dashers.

One Reddit post shared a picture of a four-piece chicken tender meal a customer ordered from DoorDash that had only three full tenders, with the fourth clearly being half-eaten. Another commenter said they experienced something similar, writing, "waited an hour for the food to finally arrive, and half of what I ordered was gone." It isn't hard to find numerous posts just like this all over social media of people telling similar stories claiming that, not only was some of their order missing, but it was pretty clear the bag or container had been opened and that someone had eaten out of it.

Some Dashers are adamant that these are isolated incidents, insisting that they have never eaten food out of an order and condemning the drivers who do. One driver, who says they've completed nearly 10,000 deliveries across multiple apps, shared that they've never even considered eating a customer's food. "I think 99% of drivers are like me, but there are the 1% who do," they wrote. Still, even if it's rare, the possibility of a Dasher taking food from an order is alarming nonetheless.

Of course, none of these issues would be nearly as big of a deal if DoorDash was eager to make things right when a customer encountered these problems. But when there are entire threads in the r/DoorDash subreddit with titles like "Worst Customer Service Ever" that are full of replies agreeing, that doesn't bode well for DoorDash's reputation for resolving issues. Most commonly, some people report only being offered paltry partial credits on orders that were completely botched, with others saying they didn't even get that.

"I was looking for a credit of $35 for the order that was delivered to me in error after the order was canceled and verified canceled. They offered to only credit me $15," one Redditor wrote. Another told a story of being delivered the wrong sandwich, and what should've been a quick and easy refund turned into a whole thing: "DoorDash customer service made him wait for 45 minutes to determine whether or not he'd get his money back. After the 45 minutes were up, they decided they weren't going to refund him. So he's out the money and left with food he can't eat." 

On Trustpilot, DoorDash's customer service and its process for refunds are a frequent point of contention. Many say that they ultimately had to settle for filing a dispute with their credit card company to actually get refunded for incorrect or missing orders — and that's after sometimes first spending hours on the phone with DoorDash customer service.