This post originally appeared on the Postman blog. Check it out here.
With unpredictable shipping delays and wait times, today’s consumer is looking for everything from same-day solutions for last-minute needs. From dry clean pickup during business trips to dog food purchases for furry friends, the various use cases for same-day delivery are growing. In this blog post, we’ll look into Drive, the best-kept secret at DoorDash.
Drive is a white label delivery API that allows businesses of all sizes to easily enable local fulfillment without the hassle of staffing their own delivery fleet. With a single API call, DoorDash Drive integration partners can request a delivery, which gets fulfilled by the DoorDash Dasher network.
Making Developers Productive​
Bobby Abraham manages Developer Strategy & Operations at DoorDash and is primarily focused on working with partner development teams to onboard developers onto Drive. In an effort to make the developer experience immersive and seamless, Bobby decided to leverage the power of the Postman API Network. He created a DoorDash Public Workspace that would allow DoorDash to tap into Postman’s 20 million registered users in a central place. Here, Drive could get easy access to and be discovered by API consumers and API producers, providing merchants a cost-effective way to deliver products directly to customers on demand.
I thought the Postman Public API Network would be a great way to spread awareness of DoorDash Drive and provide a delightful experience for our developers. The Postman team was great in helping us understand how to optimize our documentation to serve our developer partners better. Bobby Abraham, Developer Strategy & Operations at DoorDash
After Joining Postman API Network​
Since landing their Public Workspace on Postman API Network, the DoorDash team observed a significant decrease in development time for its partners. Developers can now make their first API call the same day they signup for Drive, and many partners have finished development in less than a week. This significantly decreases the time to first call (TTFC) partly due to the API-first design approach and in-depth documentation provided by the Postman API platform.
How to Get Started​
Let’s look at how you can get started using the Drive API Postman Collection.
Setting Up​
- Go to DoorDash Public Workspace to select a collection that matches the API you’d like to use. Then, fork the collection into your Postman workspace by clicking the button below.
Once you have the fork of the collection, you’ll need to add a DoorDash Developer Access Key to your Environment. Go to DoorDash Developer Portal to create an account and an access key on the portal; make sure to leave the pop-up with the essential details open.
Navigate to the left sidebar, click Environment, then click the + symbol. And name your environment “Drive sandbox.”
Paste in the “developer_id,” “key_id,” and “signing_secret” values that you generated in step 2. Leave “JWT” blank.
- In the upper right, next to the little Eyeball, click the dropdown and select the “Drive sandbox” environment you just created.
Create a delivery (without hailing real Dashers)​
Now you can create a delivery by making a request to Drive API using Postman. On the left sidebar, click Collections, then expand the Door Dash Drive collection that you forked and click Create a Delivery request. Click the Body tab to see the request that will be sent. Then click Send to create the delivery in the Drive sandbox environment.
Get the latest status of your delivery​
In the left sidebar, click the Get Delivery Status request. Ensure that the URL of the request contains the external delivery ID “D-12345” you want to get, then click Send.
Wrapping up​
If you’ve made it this far, you are ready to start adding delivery capabilities to your app and help your business reach an entirely new market!
Join the Postman API Network and share your APIs to 20M+ users in the world’s largest public API hub or book a call with one of Postman API Network Evangelists to learn more.