DoorDash has announced a new suite of tools designed to onboard SMBs to its platform in streamlined and automated ways. Highlighting things like pre-populating their business details, menus, and other relevant info, the endgame is to attract more SMBs to the platform by lowering friction.
The central function of this new suite is the ability to pull information directly from a merchant’s website, including photos, store hours, and menus. SMBs can then look over what the system generates and edit or approve. Altogether, DoorDash says that it can get SMBs up and running 35 percent faster.
If this workflow sounds familiar, it’s because this is a common digital marketing selling point these days. Utilizing AI, the idea is to simply provide a URL, and something will be generated for you. That “something” can be a promotional video (see Creatify), ad campaign, website, or other digital assets.
DoorDash is leaning into this timely concept, while also addressing SMBs’ biggest pain point: lack of time and technical chops. The new automated onboarding function checks both those boxes, which should make it more attractive. Again, that’s DoorDash’s endgame here: adoption through automation.
But it’s not just about onboarding. DoorDash says streamlined functions go beyond initial setup. The idea is to not only attract SMBs to the platform through automation, but to keep them there. And that’s all about saving them time and headaches on a day-to-day basis with tools to enhance their presence.
Retouching and Replating
So what do those tools entail? Going deeper into the particulars of DoorDash’s new suite, it includes several components that check the above boxes. Here are the highlights we boiled down…
A new video library offers a central place to…
- Upload, organize, and manage SMB video content
- Tag specific menu items in videos so customers can order directly from what they see
- Continuously refresh store pages with engaging content
- Track performance metrics such as views, video-driven sales, and customer acquisition
A new photo editing tool offers AI-powered enhancements, including three core functions:
- AI Retouch helps merchants improve existing menu photos by replacing cluttered or inconsistent backgrounds with neutral surfaces, and sharpened image quality.
- AI Re-plate transforms existing food photos by matching the food with appropriate dinnerware and enhancing things like lighting and color. The intended result is food-magazine quality images.
- Style Matching lets merchants offer a photo to be used as a model to apply to other food photos. This supports consistent/branded looks across a restaurant’s menu items.
AI-powered websites let merchants set up and launch a website quickly. This includes…
- DoorDash ordering embeds so that customers can order direct from a merchant’s website.
- Business details and generated assets on an SMBs DoorDash account can be imported to the website.
- In early tests, these AI-powered websites see order conversion rates of about 10 percent.
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Two-Way Street
So there you have it. One of the things that stands out from these features is that they don’t just live on DoorDash. Things like generated food images and other assets can be used freely by businesses on their own websites, even if they decide to stop working with DoorDash. They keep the intellectual property.
That makes the overall effort a two-way street between the points of an SMB’s online presence. Their websites can be used to generate assets on DoorDash – the crux of the time-saving benefits explored above – which can then be imported back onto their websites to up-level their production chops.
Altogether, it should be an attractive mix for busy SMBs, especially restaurant operators, who don’t have time to be digital marketers and graphic designers. That explains the vast majority of SMBs, so DoorDash’s positioning here is well devised. We’ll watch closely to see how it resonates in practice.
