DoorDash Adds Macy's, Costco and a Text-Based Shopping Assistant

DoorDash added Macy's, Anthropologie, The North Face, Vans and Timberland to its retail marketplace this week, extending a rapid run of retail expansion that already includes a milestone Costco partnership announced earlier this month.

The new apparel and lifestyle merchants give DoorDash a broader footprint beyond groceries and convenience, categories that built its marketplace business. Costco had sat at the top of DoorDash's wish list of new retailers to add, according to the company's announcement earlier this month.

Alongside the new merchants, DoorDash is launching Dasher Returns, a service designed to remove one of e-commerce's persistent friction points: getting items back to the seller. Dasher Returns coordinates a DoorDash pickup for customer returns, turning the company's courier network into a reverse-logistics solution.

The tech updates may carry the longer-term significance. This week DoorDash announced Text DoorDash, an expansion of its Ask DoorDash in-app assistant built for conversational help while browsing. The feature lets customers place orders through simple text communication without ever opening the DoorDash app.

That matters for retailers and CPG brands watching where discovery happens. A text-based ordering channel moves DoorDash closer to the behavior of an AI shopping agent than a traditional delivery app, and it signals where the company expects commerce interfaces to head.

DoorDash has also widened its reach among value-conscious grocery shoppers. This month the company expanded its Snap/EBT program by adding seven new grocers to its network. New partners include regional chains Albertsons Market, Amigos and Boyer's Food Markets.

Taken together, the moves show DoorDash pressing on three fronts at once: assortment, access and interface. National brands like Costco and Macy's broaden the marketplace's appeal; Snap/EBT acceptance through regional grocers deepens its penetration among budget-restricted households; and AI-driven tools such as Text DoorDash and Dasher Returns attack the convenience gaps that have kept some shoppers tethered to incumbent retailers.

For brands and retailers weighing third-party marketplace strategies, the Costco and Macy's additions suggest DoorDash can now deliver the kind of flagship partners that once reserved such placements for Amazon or Instacart. The pace of the announcements — a major warehouse-club partnership, a grocery benefits expansion and a batch of AI tools, all within one month — indicates the company intends to keep compounding both sides of its marketplace.

The open question for advertisers is how quickly features like Text DoorDash scale from novelty to a genuine ordering channel, and whether conversational entry points will reshape how shoppers find products inside the app.