DoorDash is best known as a restaurant food delivery platform. But in recent years, it’s expanded into grocery delivery. And now, a new partnership with Ibotta means DoorDash users won’t have to pay full price for their groceries, personal care items and household essentials that DoorDashers deliver to their doorsteps.
Ibotta and DoorDash today announced “a multi-year strategic partnership” to incorporate Ibotta-powered digital promotions onto the DoorDash platform. Beginning this spring, DoorDash users who order from non-restaurant retailers will be able to clip digital coupons when assembling their order, just like they might while browsing their local grocery or general merchandise store’s digital coupon gallery.
“Our partnership with Ibotta brings an unmatched abundance of digital offers to consumers to help them save on groceries, essentials, gifts and more,” Fuad Hannon, VP of New Verticals at DoorDash, said in a statement.
The partnership is the latest in which Ibotta has paired up with a delivery platform. Last summer, it announced a first-of-its-kind deal with Instacart, to present Ibotta’s cash-back offers as digital coupons for Instacart users. Now, the DoorDash deal will “continue to advance our presence in the growing on-demand delivery space,” Ibotta CEO Bryan Leach said.
It will also continue to advance Ibotta’s effort to make its offers ubiquitous, in various forms, on various platforms beyond its own. It all started a few years ago, when
Ibotta teamed up with Walmart to embed Ibotta’s cash-back discounts into Walmart’s website and app. Ibotta later followed up with a similar arrangement with Dollar General.
And then Ibotta began transforming its cash-back offers into digital coupons, clippable on the websites and apps of other retail partners. While Walmart and Dollar General’s Ibotta-powered offers are presented in the form of cash back, like the offers on Ibotta itself, Family Dollar and Schnucks now feature the same Ibotta-powered offers, but in the form of digital coupons – just like Instacart, and now, DoorDash. So no longer are Ibotta’s offers only in the form of after-purchase rebates, they can also be redeemed as pre-purchase discounts.
For DoorDash, the Ibotta partnership comes as it furthers its expansion beyond restaurant food deliveries. That’s what DoorDash focused on when it launched back in 2013. But in 2020, it diversified into grocery delivery for the first time, placing it in competition with the likes of Instacart and Shipt. Over the past year, DoorDash has joined forces with a number of local and regional grocery chains, including ShopRite, Wegmans, Rouses, Save A Lot and Ahold Delhaize-owned stores like Food Lion and Stop & Shop.
“It has been a monumental year for DoorDash’s grocery business,” DoorDash’s Hannon said last fall. “On-demand delivery continues to play an essential role in consumers’ daily routines as the percentage of consumers that shop across grocery on DoorDash has continued to grow significantly.”
And now, thanks to the Ibotta partnership, DoorDash grocery shoppers will no longer have to pay full price for the convenience of having their grocery, health and beauty, home improvement, alcohol and other purchases delivered.
With more than 115,000 non-restaurant stores on its platform, DoorDash says more than 99% of its customers in the U.S. now have access to a non-restaurant retailer. By pairing up with DoorDash, Ibotta and its brand partners now have access to DoorDash’s tens of millions of monthly users. And by taking advantage of these Ibotta-powered offers when they debut later this year, DoorDash customers will have access to a new way to save – without ever having to leave home.
