While platforms like Uber Eats and Grubhub are on a roll this week, finance success after finance success, DoorDash is finding itself in trouble. Here’s why.
DoorDash overcharging?
As you know, to keep the business running, DoorDash charges some of its restaurant partners so they continue to be featured on the platform. This is alright, until a Cupertino-based bakery was overcharged, asking it to pay a whopping $100,000 more!
The bakery is La Patisserie, a celebrated family-run bakery in the area where Apple, Inc. is also based. This shop offers a wide array of European pastries and custom wedding cakes.
To be able to keep its listing on DoorDash’s Most Loved eateries, it has to pay, just as businesses do when availing of ad spaces on newspapers and highway billboards.
However, the mistake of the bakery was that they just followed what DoorDash was telling them to do. They have been paying as much as $100,000 already in those expenses cloaking as those fees, until they discovered they were being “tricked.”
“We had trusted DoorDash — it was just an indescribable feeling,” La Patisserie’s managed pointed out. “It’s a life-changing amount of money for anyone, but especially for a small business.”
Undetected for 8 years!
Those “commission fees” were undetected for eight years, until the manager’s uncle, who oversees the accounting, saw the discrepancy.
So it turns out that DoorDash was charging them 30 percent commission rate, instead of 13 percent. The result was the amount of $100,000.
Let’s be clear on this. The bakery was being charged by DoorDash official itself, not some third-party company, so that makes it challenging. Restaurants would never question such fees if the requests officially come from DoorDash.
Immediately after realizing and waking up from the mistake, the bakery reached out to DoorDash in 2023, from which DoorDash acknowledge. Thank goodness.
But, what’s eerie is that, DoorDash suddenly stopped communication with them last year.
No response from DoorDash
“We’ve tried to contact DoorDash so many times — I mean, we have proof of all the call logs and email threads,” the manager said. “[But] we never got paid. It’s so frustrating.”
So, she turned to mass media who lobbied and coordinated on the bakery’s behalf toward DoorDash. Good news, the platform agreed to cover the interest costs and penalties for the app “violating the contract.”
Ridesharing media have not followed this story up as of press time.
Other DoorDash news
Meanwhile, in other (bad) DoorDash news, its merger, Deliveroo, has reported significant losses, specifically plugging below zero profits, over the the previous year and this year, and they are blaming it on its recent tie-up with DoorDash.
It was a celebration until this financial report. DoorDash, by mid of this year, acquired Deliveroo at $2.40 per share, or around $3.6 billion.
However, in the first six months of 2025, Deliveroo signed in a net loss of $25 million, down from a profit of $1.7 million in the same period in 2024. How many cars could you already buy from that amount?
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