A pizza for which he charged $24 (£20) was being advertised for $16 on DoorDash and when he secretly ordered it himself, the app paid his restaurant the full $24 while only charging him $16.

The anonymous restauranteur had not asked for his business to be added to the app’s offering. He later found out it was part of a trial to gauge customer demand.

Content strategist Ranjan Roy blogged about the business owner, who is his friend. He first heard about the situation in March 2019, when his friend started receiving complaints about deliveries, despite his business’ lack of delivery services. 

He then discovered he had been added to DoorDash and noticed it was charging a lower price for one of his premium pizzas, BBC News reports. 

To investigate the problem, he ordered 10 pizzas, paid $160 and had them delivered to a friend’s house.

The next time, the restaurant prepared his friend’s order by boxing up the pizza base without any toppings, maximising the “profit” from the mismatched prices.

But Mr Roy said: “We found out afterwards that was all the result of a ‘demand test’ by DoorDash. They have a test period where they scrape the restaurant’s website and don’t charge any fees to anyone, so they can ideally go to the restaurant with positive order data to then get the restaurant signed on to the platform.

“Third-party delivery platforms, as they’ve been built, just seem like the wrong model, but instead of testing, failing, and evolving, they’ve been subsidised into market dominance.

“You have insanely large pools of capital creating an incredibly inefficient money-losing business model.”