Design a better Marketplace experience for 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’s Marketplace helps consumers discover, compare, order, and receive goods from local restaurants, grocery stores, convenience retailers, and other merchants. In this product design interview, you are asked to design a better Marketplace experience for consumers, with attention to the end-to-end journey from opening the app to finding the right merchant or item, placing an order, tracking delivery, and deciding whether to return.

Focus on consumer-facing pain points in a multi-sided local commerce marketplace. Consumers may struggle with too many choices, unclear fees, unreliable delivery estimates, missing items, poor substitutions, inconsistent merchant quality, or difficulty comparing options across restaurants, grocery, and retail use cases. Any design direction should also recognize that DoorDash must balance consumer satisfaction with merchant ROI, Dasher earnings, delivery reliability, and unit economics.

You should define the target consumer segment and use case you are designing for rather than trying to improve every part of the Marketplace at once. Consider how the experience may differ for a weekday dinner order, a planned grocery basket, an urgent convenience purchase, a family reorder, or a price-sensitive consumer comparing DoorDash with alternatives.

The experience should consider:

- The consumer journey across discovery, search, browsing, cart building, checkout, delivery tracking, issue resolution, and reordering.

- Key friction points such as decision fatigue, trust in delivery time, fee transparency, merchant/item availability, personalization quality, and order accuracy.

- Marketplace constraints, including merchant preparation time, Dasher supply, delivery distance, batching, substitutions, refunds, and service reliability.

- How the product should help consumers make confident trade-offs between speed, price, quality, selection, and convenience.

- How the design would work across different verticals such as restaurants, grocery, convenience, and retail without creating a confusing experience.

- What information, controls, or feedback consumers need before, during, and after ordering.

- How success could be reflected in consumer outcomes while avoiding harm to merchants, Dashers, or marketplace economics.

The goal is to frame a clear consumer problem within DoorDash’s Marketplace, identify the users and moments that matter most, and describe a product experience that improves consumer confidence, convenience, and repeat usage while respecting the realities of a three-sided local delivery marketplace.