Estimate how many grocery shoppers could adopt Support in one year at global scale

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 is evaluating the potential one-year adoption of its Support experience among grocery shoppers at global scale. In this context, “Support” refers to the help and issue-resolution experience available to customers placing grocery orders, including problems such as missing items, substitutions, refunds, delivery delays, damaged goods, payment issues, or order changes.

Your task is to estimate how many grocery shoppers could adopt or use Support within one year if DoorDash made it available broadly across relevant grocery markets. This is a guesstimate, so the focus is not on finding a precise number, but on building a clear, defensible sizing approach with explicit assumptions.

You should define the scope of “grocery shoppers,” decide what counts as “adoption” of Support, and reason through the global grocery delivery market, DoorDash’s reachable share, order frequency, support incidence, and user behavior. Consider that grocery has different support needs than restaurant delivery due to larger baskets, substitutions, inventory variability, delivery windows, and higher customer expectations around refunds and replacements.

The estimate should consider:

- The geographic scope of “global scale” and which markets are realistically addressable by DoorDash or similar marketplace delivery platforms.

- The relevant population: online grocery shoppers, DoorDash grocery customers, or all grocery delivery users.

- The unit of adoption: unique shoppers using Support at least once in a year, support contacts, or eligible shoppers exposed to Support.

- Grocery order frequency and how often support-worthy issues occur per order.

- Differences between grocery and restaurant delivery support needs, including substitutions, out-of-stock items, late deliveries, and refunds.

- Competitive and ecosystem context, including Instacart, Uber Eats, Amazon, Walmart, and local delivery fleets.

- Assumptions around awareness, availability, repeat usage, and barriers to using Support.

- Sensitivity of the estimate to key assumptions such as market penetration, issue rate, and annual order frequency.

The goal is to produce a structured, sanity-checked estimate that DoorDash leadership could use to understand the potential scale of Support adoption among grocery shoppers, identify the biggest drivers of demand, and assess whether the opportunity is large enough to justify product, operations, and customer experience investment.