The Calcbench prediction: somewhere around $31. Are we right? 

We arrived at that conclusion after some quick analysis of DoorDash’s latest earnings report, filed on Tuesday morning. Along with all the usual financial numbers, the delivery giant also reports two notable non-GAAP metrics. One is the total number of orders in the period, and the other is “marketplace GOV” — the total dollar value of all orders completed, including taxes, tips, and applicable fees. (“GOV” stands for “gross order value.”)

So if you divide that number of total orders into marketplace GOV, you can calculate an average dollar value per order. 

Well, we did that math. It gave us a surprising insight into the DoorDash story.

First let’s look at the raw numbers. We started by pulling up DoorDash’s Q1 2025 earnings release to find this period’s total orders (732 million) and marketplace GOV ($23.1 billion). Then we used the See Tag History feature to pull up prior disclosures for each quarter from the start of 2021. The result is Figure 1, below.

At first glance those two lines seem to tell an impressive tale. GOV (the red line) has been climbing briskly for the last four years, while total orders (the blue line) has barely budged upwards, but that’s an illusion due to the vast differences in scale: millions for total orders, billions for GOV. Both metrics have actually been growing at roughly similar rates:

• Total orders went from 329 million at the start of 2021 to 732 million in first-quarter 2025, an increase of 122.5 percent.

• Marketplace GOV went from $9.9 billion to $23.1 billion in the same period, an increase of 133.3 percent.

So if you divide total orders into marketplace GOV to calculate an average dollar value per order, and then chart that number over time, the average value per order has hardly moved at all in the last four years. See Figure 2, below.

Average order value went from $30.09 at the start of 2021 to $31.56 today, a growth rate of only 4.9 percent. Across all 17 quarters, the average order was $30.78. (Hence our $31 prediction at the top of this post.)

One last thing, here's the implied revenue per order based and the revenue % per order.

Why does analysis like this matter? Because it helps a financial analyst to better understand DoorDash’s strategic challenges. 

That is, if DoorDash consumers keep spending roughly the same amount of money per order, rather than spending more per order — then DoorDash will need to keep getting more customers and grow by scale. So where will those future customers come from? 

Will DoorDash need to acquire its way to a larger customer footprint? (Oh look, the company just announced plans to acquire Deliveroo, a British delivery rival, for $3.9 billion!) Will it need to expand into other food and dining services? (Look again, DoorDash also announced that it will pay $1.2 billion for SevenRooms, a restaurant booking service.) 

More to the point, DoorDash clearly must do something, because this quarter’s revenues ($3.03 billion) missed expectations. While the company is profitable overall (which is more than we could say about the year-earlier period), it isn’t growing fast enough for Wall Street expectations.

A clever analyst could ferret out that insight with the right data — which, as always, Calcbench can deliver.