graduation_handbook
Graduation Handbook
Marketplace APIs are not yet generally available. Please record interest in early access here.
What Does Graduation Look Like?​
Once build is finished, DoorDash will be working with you to complete several milestones and tests in order to verify the validity and quality of your integration in conjunction with our platform features. Completing this process will ensure confidence that our mutual merchants will launch on DoorDash via your integration with reliable performance. General outline of what this end to end process looks like below:
Detailed specifications on the build and testing stages can be found under Guides -> Getting Started section of the Open API Portal.
Note: Integration graduations are held monthly. If the build deadlines outlined in the Open API Portal are not met, you will miss the scheduled monthly graduation and be pushed to the following month. No additional stores past the 20 pilot locations can be onboarded until officially graduated.
Your Technical Account Manager, or TAM, will walk through pilot and graduation with you, but can also be used as a resource for questions during build phases. Post graduation, you will have dedicated activations and support teams available. Reach out to your TAM if you have integration wide issues and/or feature related requests.
Please flag to your Technical Account Manager in the beginning phases if you will have merchants outside of the United States, Canada, or Australia looking to integrate on DoorDash.
Certification Process​
To begin the certification process, your build must be complete. Certification is required to be eligible to pilot stores. Please reach out to your technical account manager to kick off the certification process.
The certification process for standard Open API Integrations includes:
- Your team providing a recorded video walkthrough to DoorDash via a Google Drive link, demonstrating the build. Demonstration recordings should be linked out to the corresponding action item on your certification checklist/pilot tracker (example here). Examples for what these should look like are in the Certification Process video above. Final submission should include all of the required menu, order, and availability features listed in our quality standards.
- If your integration passes all quality standards validations, your integration is ready to officially pilot! In compliance with our onboarding standards, DoorDash will follow up with additional surveys in preparation of the integration graduation post-pilot, which includes:
- A survey to collect integration functionality details and contact information for our internal teams
- A survey to collect onboarding details and merchant enablement content
- An error decoding breakdown sheet to define experienced error messages with orders and menu posts/updates
Pilot​
Now that the validity of your integration on DoorDash has been proven, your TAM will now be piloting the integration with existing DoorDash marketplace stores to ensure everything works correctly in practice before the integrations are handled by internal teams. Integration partners will select approximately 20 stores from our mutual clients looking to integrate their orders on DoorDash.
If you are onboarding non-restaurant merchants that are going to be using the retail UI, your team will need to share the catalog that will be used with the menu ahead of the store’s activation. Please contact your Technical Account Manager for additional details on the retail experience.
Pilot Tracker - For this initial launch your TAM will be using a shared pilot tracker. This will be used as a master source of truth for keeping track to ensure your integration meets quality standards.
You can find a sample template of what these trackers look like here.
Note: these trackers are only used by your TAM during the pilot stage to keep all information and checks in line. Trackers will not be used post graduation, see the activations section below for full details!
While the pilot is ongoing, DoorDash will reach out to collect activations information, integration functionality details, and marketing materials. These prerequisites are required ahead of the graduation process to ensure our teams have everything they need to support the integration post-graduation. This includes:
- Company logo and signed IP Consent & Release agreement
- Mx-facing enablement content - Step-by-step overview on the following:
- How to get set up on the integration and SLAs
- How to manage the integration (on their POS, or aggregator portal if applicable) including menu/store management, live order management, troubleshooting, and FAQs with UI screenshots and/or video tutorials.
- Cost to integrate information: Will Mx have to pay an additional fee or charge for integrating with a delivery service provider.
Graduation Process​
We hold monthly graduations the last week of each month which are required in order for you to scale past the original 20 pilot stores. In order to be eligible, you must have completed the certification process at least two weeks prior to the graduation date. To begin the graduation process, your build must be complete, the integration must have been piloted with approximately 20 stores and must meet a sub-2% error rate for >14 days. If you are unable to pass graduation requirements as outlined in our quality and onboarding standards, and have missed the monthly graduation deadline, you will be eligible to graduate again next month.
The graduation process includes:
- Your team filling out an Error Decoding Collection Sheet (sample template here). This process is required to scale your integration as it enables DoorDash Support and Activations to troubleshoot integration related issues. Additionally, merchants will have visibility into their integration quality which uses these decoded errors for reporting purposes in their DoorDash Merchant Portal. a. You will provide full error responses and categorize these in the associated thematic buckets. b. Post pilot, we will follow up with any additional undefined errors for completion before graduation.
- DoorDash reviewing completed survey forms for additional information gathering on functionality, communications, marketing materials, and more. If further clarification is needed or one of the surveys is missing, DoorDash will follow up via email. a. If your integration passes all quality and onboarding standards, your integration is ready to officially graduate! See full details in the post graduation section below. b. If your integration doesn’t meet these standards, DoorDash will follow up with a list of next steps and you will be eligible to request another graduation review for the following month’s graduation class.
Post Graduation​
After your integration has officially graduated, you’ll have dedicated support teams available for you and your merchants. These teams should be your first point of contact for all store level issues and escalations.
Meet Our Teams​
Activations​
Post graduation, the DoorDash Activations teams will be responsible for integrating your stores on the platform. You will receive a graduation email that includes end to end activation details. The Activations Team workflows for your integration will be determined based on the information and surveys collected during the Certification and Graduation phases (see above).
The standard activation process for integrating an existing merchant on DoorDash is:
- The merchant logs into their DoorDash Merchant Portal and submits a request to integrate their store on POS. During this request, they will provide the integration ID (store id) and indicate the POS provider they will be integrating with.
- DoorDash receives the request and configures the store for a menu ingestion.
- DoorDash pulls a menu and escalates to your team if the menu pull is unsuccessful.
- Once DoorDash has a menu, DoorDash activates the store on the integration.
See this DoorDash help article that can be shared with your merchants for further information.
Onboarding processes differ for stores that are not currently live on DoorDash. With net new locations, these stores must first go through general DoorDash onboarding processes. General onboarding includes:
- Creating the digital store with correct address and store information
- Connecting the merchant’s account for receiving payments
- Setting geographical mapping zones.
- Granting access to the Merchant Portal
If your merchant is not currently partnered with DoorDash, feel free to point them to our sign up sheet here.
Integration Expectation Reminders
- Integration requests cannot be submitted to DoorDash unless the merchant is already a signed partner of your integration and is ready to have their menu pulled.
- Activations escalations should be responded to within the agreed upon time frame as outlined in the quality and onboarding standards.
- Merchants outside of the United States, Canada, and Australia cannot integrate unless you have communicated this to your Technical Account Manager and have been given authorization to proceed with requests.
- Test orders are not supported during onboarding as these were validated during the build phase. If the merchant would like to receive a test order, they may submit a request to the POS Support team post activation (see next section).
POS Support​
Once a store has launched live on the platform, questions and troubleshooting will become a support matter; these issues should not be directed to our Activations team. For post-activation assistance with your stores, you have multiple pathways for contacting support teams at your disposal. Upon graduation, you will receive a one pager on support details that you can share with your internal teams.
The POS Support team is available to assist with troubleshooting issues on stores that have already integrated and launched on the DoorDash platform via your integration. Some examples of common issues this team provides support for are:
- Menu Sync Issues
- Order Failures
- Store Closures
- Menu Reingestions
Escalations​
Outside of mass scale technical issues, your Technical Account Manager will also assist you with feature enhancements and changes throughout our partnership.
Outages​
Once your integration has graduated, the point of contact gathered during the pilot phase will receive automated Github emails informing them of large scale outages affecting orders on DoorDash. You can also subscribe to our DoorDash Status.io updates.
If you are experiencing outages on your end you can report this to reach out to [email protected] to alert our on-call team.