DoorDash Deploys Artificial Intelligence Suite to Streamline Merchant Operations and Digital Presence
The delivery giant introduces capabilities to generate standalone websites and automate marketing campaigns, marking a strategic shift toward broader commerce management.
DoorDash has unveiled a new suite of artificial intelligence tools designed to accelerate merchant onboarding and enhance the digital presentation of food listings. The updates, which became available on Monday, focus on reducing administrative burdens for restaurant partners while expanding the platform's capabilities beyond simple delivery logistics.
A central component of the rollout is an automated onboarding system that functions by scraping merchant websites to extract store details, menus, and photographs. This capability mirrors a similar feature introduced by Amazon in 2024. Once the system populates the listing with this data, merchants retain full control to review and edit the information before publishing it to the app.
Visual enhancements have also been integrated into the platform through two new AI-driven features. The AI Retouch tool allows for background replacement, image sharpening, and lighting optimisation without altering the dish itself. Additionally, the AI Replate feature manipulates images to simulate professional plating, adjusting lighting and colour based on reference styles provided by the user.
The company has further upgraded its video library to allow merchants to tag specific dishes for direct ordering, alongside analytics on views and video-driven sales. Complementing these visual tools, the new updates enable restaurant owners to generate standalone websites using content sourced from their existing DoorDash app listings. Testing of this feature indicated an average order conversion rate of nearly 10 per cent for the generated sites.
Brian Tolkin, head of merchant product at DoorDash, stated that the initiative aims to remove friction from the merchant experience, allowing businesses to concentrate on food quality and customer service. The introduction of these tools reflects the company's broader strategy to expand its commerce platform, offering merchants automated campaign builders for content creation, email outreach, and scheduling.
While the tools offer significant efficiency gains, specific technical limitations regarding the accuracy of the automated scraping tool for complex or non-standard websites have not been fully detailed. Furthermore, the reported conversion rates for AI-generated websites were observed during a specific test period, and long-term performance across diverse restaurant types remains to be established.
