Giving DoorDash drivers ultimate flexibility over their earnings
Many DoorDash drivers aren’t financially secure. They use their earnings to cover the basics, like paying bills and buying groceries. To give drivers greater financial stability—and make DoorDash more competitive—I led the push for over a year to make payouts instant and on-demand.
Challenge
As the Driver Design Lead it was my responsibility to build relationships with drivers and identify product opportunities. Because many drivers rely on DoorDash to make ends meet, increasing pay flexibility was an opportunity to build something beneficial for drivers while increasing driver retention for the business.
Prior to DoorDash Fast Pay
Originally, DoorDash paid drivers once a week. Many drivers sought greater pay flexibility through a third-party service called DailyPay, which transferred earnings to them once a day for $2.99 per transfer. $21 in fees per week was a lot for drivers making $7 a delivery.
Also, if payment issues arose it was often unclear whether DailyPay or DoorDash was responsible. Drivers would contact either company’s support team for help, only to be told that the other company was likely responsible.
Business Benefits
In addition to giving drivers more flexibility, I believed DoorDash would benefit significantly from improving its payment offerings. At the time, Grubhub, Postmates, and Amazon all offered more flexible payment options. DoorDash needed to catch up to the competition to retain existing drivers and attract new drivers.
With payouts just once per week, DoorDash had the lowest earnings flexibility of the companies we reviewed
Approach
Validation
Just because the competition is doing something doesn’t necessarily mean it’s right for your business. I wanted to know whether Dashers would be interested in a more flexible pay option—and what they’d expect—before committing engineering resources to the effort.
DoorDash didn’t have a user research team yet, so I developed relationships with local Dashers and conducted informal studies. A Facebook group of over 8,000 Bay Area Dashers was the best place to run a quick survey and gauge interest.
Design principles
Support from Dashers helped convince product management to get onboard. Before designing the interface, I spoke to Dashers to determine how Fast Pay should function. Two guiding principles emerged from my conversations:
Principle 1: Opt-In
While on-demand payouts were a popular idea, some drivers used weekly payouts to budget their earnings. Instead of replacing the existing system, we added Fast Pay as an optional feature and didn’t change the existing weekly direct deposits.
Principle 2: On-Demand
DailyPay, the only option for Dashers who wanted their pay more regularly, transferred earnings every day—whether drivers wanted it that often or note. Instead of being tied to a daily or weekly payout schedule, drivers wanted to choose when to transfer their earnings.
Product design
From the Earnings tab to the Transfer Details page, introducing on-demand payments required us to reconsider how we displayed pay throughout the Dasher app. I explored several different concepts for how to simply and clearly visualize earnings, transfers, and fees to drivers.
Concept 1: “Simple breakdown”
On the Earnings tab we originally displayed the amount Dashers earned from Monday to Sunday, each week. The simplest way to integrate on-demand transfers was to record how many Fast Pay fees were being subtracting from earnings. This is the direction we ultimately selected because it was most similar to the current experience, making it easier to build and more familiar to Dashers. It would also allow for a consistent user experience regardless of whether or not a Dasher had set up Fast Pay.
Concept 2: “Activity list”
This concept also maintained the existing “weekly earnings” model, but provided more detail about the transfers and fees. The Earnings Details page would mimic a credit card balance, showing the dates and amounts for all activity: earnings, transfers, and fees.
Concept 3: “Available Balance”
Because transfers could now be made on-demand, we considered moving away from the “weekly earnings” paradigm entirely. Similar to Venmo, we could instead emphasize the current balance available to transfer. Transferring funds would create a new transfer line item, where earnings and fee details would be displayed.
We chose not to pursue this direction because weekly earnings was still a relevant construct. The change would have required significant engineering effort, and not having a weekly earnings report would have undermined how Dashers managed their personal budgets.
Considerations to limit fraud
Because earnings could be transferred so rapidly, the company had to prepare for fraud. To prevent bad actors from abusing the system, we placed several restrictions on Fast Pay:
Only Dashers who had completed 100 deliveries and had been Dashing for at least two weeks could sign up for Fast Pay
Transferring funds via Fast Pay was only available under certain conditions, such as one transfer per day or no transfers while on an active delivery shift.
Dashers were charged a $1.99 fee for Fast Pay transfers. This was more expensive than Uber, but cheaper than DailyPay, and allowed the company to proactively recoup any initial fraud costs until further fraud prevention could be developed.
Results
The Dasher app’s most popular feature
I pushed for a more flexible pay solution for over a year, ultimately working with three different product managers to bring the feature to fruition. I carefully designed every edge case, which led to the “smoothest product rollout at DoorDash” according to one PM. On-demand, instant payouts have been hugely popular with Dashers. Years later, Fast Pay is still one of the most used features in the Dasher app.
Competitive differentiator
With Fast Pay, DoorDash moved from a laggard to a leader in food delivery. Fast Pay made DoorDash significantly more competitive, with pay flexibility surpassing Amazon and Postmates. The ability to receive earnings within 30-minutes was a game changer for many Dashers. New drivers were more attracted to DoorDash, and existing drivers were excited by one of the most significant improvements to the DoorDash driver app.
DoorDash’s Fast Pay feature was comparable to Uber and Lyft’s payout features, just slightly more expensive
Changes to Dasher behavior
Being able to receive earnings instantly created a new sense of instant gratification, which incentivized drivers to Dash more. Because Fast Pay was only available to drivers who had completed 100 deliveries, there was new motivation to quickly complete enough deliveries to unlock the Fast Pay functionality.
Reduced costs
By offering Fast Pay, DoorDash was able to remove integrations with DailyPay. Overnight, this reduced the number of weekly payment errors, leading to fewer calls to support about missing pay. DoorDash was also able to renegotiate rates with payment provider Stripe.