Ghost Kitchen & Dark Kitchen Closing Checklist - Refunds, Ratings & Menu Sync

On DoorDash, the delivery must have occurred within the last 14 days for a merchant to raise the dispute themselves. Beyond that, you have to contact DoorDash Support. Errors a customer reports 72 or more hours after delivery are not charged to the merchant at all. The charge itself is 25% to 100% of the applicable item price plus tax. A wholly wrong order is charged at 100% of order subtotal plus tax, after commissions are taken out. Note this is DoorDash's published rule. Uber Eats, Deliveroo and Just Eat do not publish equivalent windows. Check your own merchant agreement, which changes more often than the law does. That short self-service window is the entire reason to pull refunds and error adjustments per brand at close, rather than at month-end. A same-day packing log is what wins the dispute. Nobody reconstructs one two weeks later.

Mostly for duplicate menus and too few orders. Brands get no warning before they are removed. Uber Eats removed 8,000 virtual restaurant listings between March and July 2023, in a duplication crackdown. It requires a minimum of 3 orders per week for a listing to stay live. DoorDash requires virtual brands to show 50% menu differentiation from other menus at the same address. It also requires a minimum of 8 items, and at least 50% hot or prepared items. Auditing each brand against those rules at close is cheaper than discovering a brand has been delisted.

For an independent brand with no shopfront, the rating effectively is the shopfront. So yes. A one-star increase in Yelp rating caused a 5–9% increase in revenue for independent restaurants. The effect was close to zero for chains. That study is for sit-down restaurants and covers Seattle revenue from 2003 to 2009. Treat the number as a general trend, not a forecast for delivery apps. The complaint mix is worth as much as the reply. 24% of consumers hit by an incorrect order request a refund, 20% stop reordering, and 17% post a review. 66% blame the restaurant rather than the courier. So categorising each complaint as missing item, wrong item, cold, late, seal or spill tells you which control actually failed.