Your DoorDash completion rate is the percentage of delivery requests that you accept and deliver to the customer. While your DoorDash acceptance rate does not matter, DoorDash makes it clear that your completion rate does matter. Indeed, DoorDash has made it even more important now, as they’ve now raised the minimum completion rate percentage from 80% to 90%. If your completion rate falls under 90%, you risk deactivation by DoorDash.
In this post, we’ll go into more detail about how the DoorDash completion rate is calculated and some strategies you can use to properly manage your completion rate.
DoorDash Completion Rate – How It’s Calculated
Your DoorDash completion rate is one of the four major metrics that DoorDash tracks (the others are customer rating, acceptance rate, and on-time or early percentage). The completion rate is calculated by looking at the last 100 deliveries that you accepted and whether you ultimately completed the delivery to the customer. Deliveries that aren’t completed because you canceled the order after you accepted it will lower your completion rate.
An example will help clarify how your completion rate is calculated. To calculate your completion rate, we simply take your last 100 delivery requests that you accepted and divide that by the number of deliveries you completed in your last 100 accepted deliveries.
So, if in your last 100 delivery requests, you accepted and completed 100 deliveries, you’d have a completion rate of 100%. If your next delivery, you don’t complete it because you canceled it after accepting it, your completion rate would drop to 99% (99 divided by 100 equals 99%).
DoorDash’s Completion Rate Policy
Your DoorDash completion rate does matter when it comes to whether you can be deactivated. DoorDash makes clear in its documentation that if your completion rate falls below 90%, you are subject to deactivation.
Note that this is a change from previous requirements, where DoorDash only required an 80% completion rate. In February 2024, DoorDash sent out emails to Dashers letting them know that the requirement would be changing starting on March 7, 2024. One nice thing is that DoorDash reset everyone’s completion rate to 100% on February 27, 2024, so every Dasher should get a fresh start as of that date.
From a practical standpoint, under the new DoorDash completion rate policy, Dashers can fail to complete 10 deliveries out of their last 100 accepted deliveries. This shouldn’t be an issue for most Dashers, but you will want to manage your completion rate carefully to avoid potential deactivation.
One Big Caveat – DoorDash Completion Rate Is A Rolling Number
One thing a lot of Dashers fail to understand is that your DoorDash completion rate is based on your last 100 deliveries. Your last 100 deliveries are a rolling number, so that means your oldest delivery stays on your record until you accept another delivery. Once you accept a new delivery, the oldest delivery in your 100 deliveries rolls off and is replaced by the new delivery.
Why this is important is because the of your deliveries matters a lot. Let’s say you have 100 accepted deliveries and you have completed all of them. That would make your completion rate 100%. If your next 10 deliveries you don’t complete them, you’d have an acceptance rate of 90%. However, since your 10 most recent deliveries were not completed, those would stay on your record and count towards your completion rate until they are replaced by new deliveries. But remember, your oldest deliveries are rolled off first, so it would take you 90 deliveries before your first non-completed delivery rolls off your record.
What this means is whenever you don’t complete a delivery, it’ll take 100 deliveries before that non-completed delivery is replaced by a completed delivery. That means it can take a long time to change your completion rate.
Strategies To Manage Your DoorDash Completion Rate
It’s still okay to have non-completed deliveries, but you want to be careful about how you manage it, especially since DoorDash now requires a 90% completion rate. Here are a few strategies to use when it comes to your DoorDash completion rate.
1. Spread Out The Deliveries You Don’t Complete
Because your completion rate is based on your rolling accepted deliveries, it’s important to spread out the deliveries you don’t complete. Every time you don’t complete a delivery, it will count against your completion percentage for the next 100 deliveries, so it’ll take a long time to get it removed.
The best thing you can do is to spread out the deliveries you don’t complete. For example, you don’t want to unassign ten deliveries in a row, because doing that will mean you’ll be stuck at a 90% completion rate for a long time.
My recommendation is to limit yourself to unassigning or not completing a delivery every 15 or 20 deliveries. That way, you’ll give yourself more chances to raise your completion rate as you go.
2. Give Yourself A Buffer
The second thing I highly recommend doing is giving yourself a buffer. DoorDash says you need a 90% completion rate to avoid deactivation, but I wouldn’t recommend hovering around 90%. If possible, keep yourself at around 95%. That way, if something does happen, you give yourself more cushion to avoid deactivation.
Back when DoorDash required an 80% completion rate, I always kept my completion rate at a minimum of 92%. This gave me plenty of cushion to avoid deactivation.
Of course, with a 90% completion rate requirement, you have less cushion to work with, but if you keep yourself at around a 95% completion rate, you should be in good shape.
3. Be Strategic About The Orders You Accept
The higher completion rate requirement means you need to be more strategic about which delivery requests you accept because once you accept an order, you might be on the hook to deliver it. DoorDash shows you the restaurant location and the customer location, so you should have plenty of information to decide if the delivery is worth it.
The main negative with the new completion rate requirement is that it limits the number of double orders you can accept where one of the orders is good, but the other one is bad.
There are a lot of situations where you’ll get a double order where the first order is a worthwhile one to complete but the second order isn’t worth doing. A lot of times, I would accept those orders, then immediately unassign the second order, leaving me with just the single good order. Doing this would lower my completion rate, but it was worth it for me to take that hit.
With a 90% completion rate requirement, you can still do this, but you need to be a bit more careful. It’s still a bummer though because a lot of times, I’ll get a double order where I’d like to accept just the first order, but because I don’t want to hurt my completion rate, I have to decline the entire order.
4. It’s Still Okay To Unassign Or Cancel Orders
While the 90% completion rate requirement makes things a little more challenging, it’s still okay to unassign or cancel orders. DoorDash recognizes that sometimes you can’t complete an order, which is why the completion rate requirement still only requires you to complete 90 of your last 100 orders to avoid deactivation.
Most of the time, you’ll be unassigning or canceling orders in situations where the restaurant is way behind on orders. If you’re forced to wait for a long time, the order might not be worth doing, so unassigning in that situation will make sense.
You may also unassign orders in the double order situation where one order is good but the other order isn’t. The main thing is to be aware of where your completion percentage currently stands so you can be strategic about unassigning or canceling orders.
Final Thoughts
DoorDash changed the completion rate, increasing the requirement from 80% to 90% to avoid deactivation. It’s a fairly big change, but one that can be dealt with so long as you understand how your completion rate is calculated and are strategic about the orders you accept and the orders you cancel or unassign.
For me, I’ll be aiming to keep my completion rate around 95% because of the new requirements. I’ll also have to be a bit more careful about accepting certain double orders. But overall, my strategy of how I deliver for DoorDash shouldn’t change too much.
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