In March 2025, Restaurantology completed a scan of nearly 15,000 multi-unit restaurant websites. The goal? Identify brands using DoorDash Storefront, the commission-free direct ordering tool embedded into restaurant websites. What we found was surprising.

399 brands—each with 2 or more locations—showed signals that they were leveraging DoorDash Storefront. That alone is notable. But what makes this even more interesting is where those brands sit across the industry:

• 201 IND (2-5 units)
• 146 SMB (6-20 units)
• 46 MM (21-100 units)
• 6 ENT (101+ units)

It’s common for tech adoption to start small and move upmarket. But this kind of balance is rare.

Storefront isn’t just appealing to independents looking to simplify online ordering—it’s gaining early traction with mid-market and enterprise brands that have historically relied on middleware or POS-native solutions.

Storefront’s adoption also highlights a go-to-market advantage that’s often overlooked. Most restaurant tech vendors struggle to profitably serve smaller segments due to high CAC and labor-intensive onboarding. DoorDash, on the other hand, can activate new restaurants with near-zero sales effort—operators sign up and self-implement. According to DoorDash’s own documentation, Storefront can be launched directly from a merchant’s Google Business Profile.

This kind of frictionless GTM allows DoorDash to scale down-market far faster than traditional SaaS, reaching brands that many vendors write off as too costly to serve.

What DoorDash might really be building

DoorDash Storefront looks like a simple product: a branded webpage for direct ordering, without the delivery commission. But dig deeper, and it starts to feel like the opening move in a much larger strategy.

In recent months, signs have emerged that DoorDash is quietly expanding into two major areas:

• Point of sale: There are rumors of DoorDash working on its own POS. While details remain scarce, the move suggests DoorDash may be aiming to manage not just third-party and direct orders—but in-store transactions as well.
• Payments: Through a partnership with Klarna, DoorDash has launched Afterpay which offers consumers the ability to “buy now, pay later.”

Combine these signals with Storefront’s adoption and a clear picture starts to form. DoorDash isn’t just facilitating transactions. It’s positioning itself to own them.

If it succeeds, the company could control:

• Order origination (Storefront)
• Transaction flow (Payments)
• In-store operations (POS)
• Guest relationship (via DashPass, loyalty integrations, etc.)

That’s not just disruptive to online ordering. It puts pressure on the entire restaurant tech stack—particularly POS and loyalty vendors.

What this means for the industry

Storefront’s multi-segment growth suggests that restaurants aren’t just using DoorDash for delivery anymore. They’re increasingly routing first-party transactions through a third-party platform. That raises important questions:

• If order volume, guest recency, and transaction data begin consolidating inside the DoorDash ecosystem, where does that leave POS vendors?
• How should middleware providers respond when their differentiator—order aggregation—is being absorbed by platforms with far deeper consumer reach?
• What happens when DoorDash becomes the first party?

These are questions we believe every restaurant tech GTM team should be asking not out of fear, but out of curiosity. Because while Storefront may have started as a value-added link, its adoption pattern suggests something far more strategic is underway.

DoorDash is quietly building what many vendors spend years trying to become: indispensable.

Final thought

Restaurantology’s 2024 Market Pulse made it clear: modularity is the future of restaurant tech. But what happens when a company like DoorDash begins assembling modules before it ever sells software?

This isn’t a prediction piece. It’s a prompt. A call to look closely at what your customers are adopting, and what it might signal.

As someone who works every day to help restaurant tech companies align their GTM strategies with real market data, my mission is simple: empower vendors with visibility, context, and confidence. If Storefront is showing up in places you didn’t expect, there’s a reason. And we can help you find it.