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Comment by brazzledazzle | Hacker News Reader

It’s not really directly relevant to their valuation but if I can prevent someone else from that experience: DoorDash will happily let you pass your phone around a group browsing and adding things but it’s only during the actual payment attempt that they’ll deny it and inform you that you can’t order more than $50 worth of food. It was (at least at the time) documented nowhere. The app didn’t prevent you from adding more than that amount and their FAQ said nothing. Uber Eats (for better or worse) didn’t have any of those issues.

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I don't deny your experience, but it doesn't match mine. I am able to confirm 15 orders over the last two years higher than $50, the highest landing at $73.

Unless we're to believe the app is detecting multiple users surreptitiously and has an opinion on them, group orders / a phone being passed around seems irrelevant, but also not within my personal experience.

(Zip: 94086, and I love Indian leftovers from Ulavacharu, usually individual orders)

Maybe I’ll give it another shot. The app bugged and double charged me for one order and it took a week or so to sort out so maybe they flagged me. That would be bit obnoxious but understandable if they couldn’t differentiate between a bug and fraud.

This could be a bug that you encountered. I've ordered tens of thousands dollar worth of food through their app or website in the last 3 years, often each order is $50-$200 (everyday lunch for our startup). Although, now I only use the 'group order' feature ever since they introduced it, before that it was more like 'passing the phone around' as you mentioned.

I did try different payment methods to no avail. I didn’t know they have a group order feature, that’s actually makes trying it out again tempting.

I imagine they must do this to minimize risk for certain accounts based on factors unknown to me. I don't know what your error message said exactly, but perhaps the restaurant themselves placed an upper limit on delivery orders because they don't like that they are missing out on the tip for large orders. This is purely speculation by me of course.

Some of the fancier places will easily be over $25 of food so if you order for two, $50 is not difficult to reach.

Out of curiosity had you ordered from DoorDash multiple times before you attempted that group order?

I did order before. I thought it may have been some kind of fraud detection but I’d ordered from them multiple times to the same address. In fact, one of the first times I ordered they double billed me. Took a week or so to straighten that out with support. But even if it was some kind of fraud prevention flag it would have been nice to get stopped at that amount while ordering.

Their app has a ton of bugs in it. A simple bug i came across was by setting an address to a location they don't serve and doing a search. My display left me with

"The operation couldn't be completed. (JSONMapper.MappingError error 2.)"

Displaying an error like that to the end user does not inspire confidence.

I got a lot of weird glitches and bugs as well but I chalked it up to it being (I assume) a web view based app without the rough edges smoothed out.

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