DoorDash and Shopify Offer E-commerce Bright Spots

Anybody hunting for dark signs about consumer spending will have to look somewhere other than a couple of earnings reports from e-commerce companies today. DoorDash, for example, said its food-delivery business hit all-time highs in terms of revenue, gross value of orders on its marketplace and total orders. The company said revenue jumped 33% to $2.13 billion in the second quarter compared to the year-earlier period, and DoorDash is bullish enough about the future that it bumped its full-year forecast for gross marketplace volume to a range of $64.2 billion to $65.2 billion from a previous range of $63 billion to $64.5 billion.

On an earnings call with analysts, DoorDash CEO Tony Xu sounded like e-commerce executives of yore when he bragged that online meal delivery represents only a single-digit percentage of the restaurant business—the implication being that there’s a lot of market pie left for DoorDash to gobble up. That was a popular talking point among his peers until growth ground to a halt for many of them as the pandemic spike in online shopping dissipated.