Skip to main content

Upgrade from auto-onboarding to the Business & Store APIs

caution

This guide only applies to you if:

  1. You are a platform or middleware provider (not a restaurant or a merchant)
  2. You pay one invoice for all the deliveries made by all of your merchants

Why upgrade​

We've created an improved alternative to the auto-onboarding of businesses and stores that you use today. These APIs have a few key advantages over auto-onboarding:

Improved delivery quality​

DoorDash uses Google Maps to resolve the pickup_address that you provide when you create a delivery. For some stores, especially stores in newly-mapped or newly-built locations, the Google Maps place ID for the address you provide can change over time, leading Dashers to go to the wrong location. Creating stores through the Store API allows a DoorDash operator to pin a store's location so that the Dasher appears at the right location every time.

Peace of mind​

If something goes wrong during the auto-onboarding process, a store might have food sitting on a table waiting to get delivered, which makes for a stressful experience trying to resolve the auto-onboarding issue before the food has to be remade. Creating stores through the Store API allows a merchant to be certain that a store has the right address, pickup instructions, billing information, and more, before any deliveries are made.

Clear invoices​

Creating businesses and stores through the Business & Store APIs helps DoorDash provide you the most accurate invoice for the deliveries made by each merchant and each store.

Better support experiences​

Creating stores through the Store API ensures that DoorDash Support can easily locate and troubleshoot deliveries when a merchant calls in.

If your merchants use the DoorDash Merchant Portal, it also ensures that a store operator can see all of their deliveries in one place in the portal. Merchant Portal access is not mandatory, but we recommend it as a tool to help merchants track and manage orders.

Access to leads from DoorDash marketing sites​

get.doordash.com ranks well in SEO and may be the first place your merchants land when they're seeking out a local delivery integration; the Business API and webhooks enable those leads to have a seamless onboarding experience so that more merchants convert.

Self-serve access to new delivery capabilities​

In the coming months, we'll be augmenting the Business & Store model with the ability for you to self-serve enable delivery capabilities that require additional configuration or an additional agreement with DoorDash, like alcohol deliveries and catering/large order deliveries.

How to upgrade​

Today, auto-onboarding happens whenever you make any request to the Drive (classic) API and provide an external_business_name and external_store_id. You might use auto-onboarding ahead of creating a delivery by calling the delivery estimate API or the delivery validation API, or you might use auto-onboarding at delivery creation time just by calling the delivery creation API.

If you auto-onboard before delivery creation​

If your code calls the delivery estimate API or the delivery validation API to auto-onboard stores, upgrading to the Business & Store APIs is straightforward. Just replace the code that calls one of these APIs with calls to the Business & Store APIs by following the use businesses & stores how-to guide. If you want to confirm that a business is active and ready to go, just check the activation_status field that's returned when you create a business.

If you auto-onboard at delivery creation time​

If you let auto-onboarding happen when you call the delivery creation API, you need to make two main changes to adopt the Business & Store APIs:

  1. Call the Business & Store APIs during your merchant and store onboarding processes, so that every new merchant gets a DoorDash business (and external_business_id) and a DoorDash store (and external_store_id) that you can use to make deliveries, by following the use businesses & stores how-to guide.
  2. Update the code that calls the delivery creation API to use the external_business_id and external_store_id that was created by the code you wrote in the previous step.

Next steps​