Ollie O’Toole

An order of Sushi from Ahi sushi and habachi.

When you are sitting at home and want a meal or a snack, you probably turn to your phone. When you order your food, there are a lot of factors that can affect if your experience is negative or positive, including price, delivery time, options of places to order, and the condition of your food. In search of the best delivery experience, I tested the two most popular meal delivery services: DoorDash and Uber Eats.

One of the major factors to consider when choosing a service is the speed of delivery. I ordered from both apps and found they took about the same time to deliver. There can be a lot of variation in delivery times because each driver is different, but in my case, they took about the same amount of time. The express delivery also took about the same time. The only difference in the time of delivery was that Uber Eats was able to calculate their expected wait-time better. For DoorDash, the expected wait time was either too high or too low. For example, one order that was supposed to take 20 minutes took 35 minutes, and another that was supposed to take 55 minutes took less than 45 minutes.

The second factor I analyzed was the price. Both Uber Eats and DoorDash calculate the price the same way: the restaurant cost plus driver cost plus a service fee. This means the cost is the same in the end. The tip percentage was somewhat strange on Uber Eats, however. While on DoorDash the tip options were 10% 15%, 20%, 30%, or no tip, on Uber Eats, the options were 11%, 14%, 17%, 20%, or other. This is not a huge issue when ordering, but it was a little confusing.

The condition of the food when it reaches your house is an important factor in your experience. This mainly depends on the driver. Unfortunately, I had bad experiences on both apps with food condition, though I found that this was more of a problem on Uber Eats than on DoorDash. They both have the same requirements for becoming a driver, so there seems to be no simple reason for this experience. Overall it will come down to the driver.

A major thing that stuck out to me in the experience with ordering was the places that Uber Eats and DoorDash let me order from. For the most part there were more restaurants on DoorDash. Most restaurants were on both apps, but there were definitely some places, including blue line pizza, that were on DoorDash that weren’t on Uber Eats. In addition to this, there was one restaurant that let me order from it on DoorDash, but Uber Eats said it was too far away from me to order. I didn’t find any other restaurants like this so maybe it was a one off thing; however, it was still strange.

If you use these services a lot, you might buy one of the monthly memberships such as Dash Pass or Uber One. Both of these subscriptions cost $10 a month. They both allow you to order with no delivery fee and with reduced cost on orders. The main difference, however, is that the Uber One membership also works for the regular Uber transportation service and gets you 5% off ride fares. This means that if you are looking for a better value, choose Uber One.

The final thing I looked at was user experience. Overall they have a very similar user experience. However, DoorDash was just a little bit less confusing to work with. Uber Eats, by no means, had a bad user experience, it just wasn’t as streamlined and simple as that of DoorDash.

After doing all this research, I asked Woodside students what they prefer. Overwhelmingly people said DoorDash, though most people said it for different reasons.

“I prefer DoorDash because I think it’s easier to use compared to Uber Eats,” sophomore Sydney Garcia said.
“I don’t really use Uber Eats, and I feel like DoorDash just has more options,” sophomore Lily Lyssand said.
“I think DoorDash is better; it gets here faster,” sophomore Karina Oliver said.
“[I preferred DoorDash] Because it’s just, it’s just the classic,” freshman Anica Gaggar said.
“[I use DoorDash] because it hasn’t been perfect, but it’s been okay,” college and career counselor Zorina Matavulj said. “We’ve had meals when we needed them.”
“All my friends use DoorDash, so that’s the one I downloaded,” senior Arianna Gerola said.

Even though there is not a huge difference between the apps, because of the customer experience and simplicity of use, I would recommend people use DoorDash over Uber Eats.