Define success metrics for Marketplace serving consumers

Problem Statement Description

Product context: DoorDash is a local commerce and delivery platform; its products include restaurant delivery, DashPass, grocery and retail delivery, merchant tools, and dasher tools.

DoorDash Marketplace connects consumers with local merchants and Dashers across food delivery, grocery, convenience, and other local commerce use cases. In this metrics interview, you are asked to define what “success” means for the consumer side of the marketplace and how DoorDash should measure whether the consumer experience is healthy and improving.

Focus on the end-to-end consumer journey: discovering options, evaluating price and delivery promise, placing an order, tracking fulfillment, receiving the order, resolving issues, and deciding whether to return. The metrics should reflect both consumer value and marketplace realities, including delivery reliability, merchant availability, Dasher supply, affordability, and sustainable unit economics.

Your scope is not to design a new feature or growth campaign. Instead, frame a practical metrics system that DoorDash product, operations, and marketplace teams could use to monitor consumer outcomes, diagnose problems, and make decisions across different markets, categories, and customer segments.

The experience should consider:

- A clear definition of the primary consumer success metric and why it represents marketplace value.

- The denominator and event boundaries for each important metric, such as sessions, checkouts, orders, active consumers, or completed deliveries.

- Funnel coverage from app open/search through order completion, issue resolution, and repeat usage.

- Instrumentation needed to capture consumer intent, availability, pricing, delivery estimates, substitutions, cancellations, refunds, and support contacts.

- Cohorts and cuts such as new vs. returning consumers, DashPass vs. non-DashPass, geography, cuisine/category, time of day, and delivery vs. pickup.

- Guardrail metrics for marketplace balance, including merchant outcomes, Dasher experience, reliability, affordability, and contribution margin.

- How the metrics would help teams distinguish consumer demand issues from supply, selection, pricing, operational, or quality problems.

The goal is to propose a metrics framework that is specific, measurable, and decision-useful for DoorDash Marketplace serving consumers, while showing awareness that improving one consumer metric can create trade-offs elsewhere in a three-sided local commerce marketplace.