Get Quartz in your inbox

Free daily briefing on global business news.

How DoorDash, Instacart, and Uber Eats became retail's delivery backbone

Three delivery apps turned other companies' store shelves into a shared same-day network. Thousands of retailers now pay for that reach

Michael Nagle / Bloomberg via Getty Images

When Home Depot $HD promises to bring tools to a job site in an hour and Dollar Tree $DLTR drops party supplies at a shopper's doorstep, neither is moving the goods. That work belongs to Instacart, DoorDash, or Uber $UBER Eats, three companies that connect stores to drivers so their partners can offer same-day delivery.

Tony Xu completed DoorDash's first delivery more than 12 years ago as a school project he named PaloAltoDelivery.com, handing over an order of chicken pad thai with spring rolls and keeping the fee himself. The company he built from that now averages more than seven million deliveries a day, and Xu has been explicit that restaurants were always meant to be the opening act. "There is a reason why the name of the company is DoorDash, unrestricted to food," he wrote in his 2024 letter to shareholders.

"That's because local economies do not grow from restaurants alone, and it was a matter of time before we'd serve other types of retailers."

Instacart, DoorDash, and Uber Eats each pushed past the niche they started in until their network carried almost any store a shopper might want. DoorDash, which launched grocery and convenience in mid-2020 and added home improvement in 2024, now serves 44 of the top 100 U.S. retailers alongside its restaurants.

Uber took the same path from the other direction, recasting grocery, alcohol, convenience, and general merchandise as a single "Grocery & Retail" business. It added Home Depot for contractors ordering........

© Quartz