DoorDash and UberEats Are Overcharging You — How to Audit

Most restaurant operators do not read their DoorDash statements. The CSV is 14 columns wide, the rows do not line up with the POS, and the fee categories shift between billing cycles. Nobody opens it. The platforms know nobody opens it. That is the actual problem.

This is not a conspiracy piece. DoorDash, UberEats, and Grubhub are not running a coordinated scam. What they are running is a billing system at the scale of millions of orders a week, and that system makes systematic errors — almost always in the platform's favor, because the disputed-but-uncaught dollars are revenue and the disputed-and-caught dollars are a refund line item. The math of the situation only ever points one direction.

The result is roughly what you would expect. Across the trailing 12 months of statements I have audited for restaurants doing $20K-$80K a month in third-party delivery, the average overcharge rate lands between 0.5% and 2.0% of gross sales. On a $30,000-a-month DoorDash operation that math comes out to $1,800-$7,200 a year that the restaurant is owed and is not being paid.

The good news: most of it is recoverable. The bad news: the recovery process takes 6 hours a month of CSR-grade clerical time, which is exactly why almost no restaurant runs it. The middle path is the one this post is about — pulling the statements, running the math, filing the disputes, and recovering the dollars without burning a payroll line.

Where the overcharges actually live

There are four categories of overcharge that show up in roughly that order of frequency. None of them are exotic. All of them are buried.

1. Menu-pricing creep without permission

The platform takes the menu you uploaded and applies its own "marketplace adjustment" — usually 15-25% above your dine-in price — to make the marketplace economics work. That is contractual and disclosed. What is not always disclosed is the drift: the platform will, on its own, raise the marketplace price on items it identifies as high-converting, or apply a "dynamic premium" on peak nights, or run a category-level mark-up during promo windows. The commission gets calculated against the higher price. The restaurant gets paid against the originally-uploaded price.

The 2024 FTC complaint against Grubhub called out a version of this — "drip pricing" on the consumer side that misrepresented the restaurant's actual menu. Grubhub settled for $25 million in December 2024 and agreed to disclose more of the price-adjustment math going forward. The settlement did not require retroactive refunds to merchants, which is the part most restaurant operators missed.

2. Duplicated fee assessments

The platform charges a commission tier (15% for marketplace, 30% for marketplace + logistics) plus a slate of per-order fees. On a meaningful fraction of orders — somewhere between 1.5% and 4% in the audits I have run — one of the per-order fees gets applied twice. Once on the order-creation event, once on the post-completion settlement. Both line items show up. Both get deducted from the restaurant's payout.

The platforms will refund every single one of these once you flag them. They are unambiguous errors, the system logs prove it, and disputing them is a 3-minute customer support conversation. The problem is finding them in a 14-column CSV with 4,000 rows.

3. Refund accounting mismatches

When a customer gets a refund, the platform deducts the refund amount from the restaurant's payout. What goes wrong is the accounting: the refund deduction gets coded against the wrong order, or the deduction is taken at the gross order amount instead of the restaurant's net-of-commission share, or the refund event fires twice in the settlement system and gets deducted twice.

Each of those is a small dollar amount per occurrence — $4, $11, $22 — but they pile up. Across 30 days of statements on a high-volume shop, the refund-accounting mismatch line is usually the second-largest category of recoverable error after menu-pricing creep.

4. Marketing and ad-fee opt-outs that were not respected

DoorDash and UberEats both run merchant-funded ad programs. The opt-out, in practice, often does not propagate cleanly. The restaurant turns off Sponsored Listings on Monday; the system continues to deduct sponsored-listing fees through Thursday. The dollars that fall into the delay window are recoverable but only if you flag them within the dispute window, which closes 30-60 days after the billing cycle.

The audit process, end to end

This is the part where the work happens. The process is the same whether you do it by hand or run the Commission Reclaim audit against your statements automatically.

Step 1 — Pull the statements. Trailing 14 months from each active platform. DoorDash exports as CSV from the Merchant Portal under Financials → Statements. UberEats exports under Pay Statements → Detailed Order Report. Grubhub exports under Statements → Settlement Detail.

Step 2 — Categorize line items. Every row breaks into one of: gross order, commission, per-order fees, marketing fees, refunds, adjustments, payouts. Most CSVs label these inconsistently across billing cycles. Map them to a clean schema. A tuned classifier hits the right bucket 96-98% of the time and surfaces the ambiguous 2-4% for human review.

Step 3 — Run the discrepancy checks. For each order, validate: was the commission tier correct based on your contract? Was the per-order fee schedule applied once? Does the refund deduction match the platform's published policy for that refund reason code? Was the marketing fee assessed against an opt-in campaign that was actually live?

Step 4 — File the disputes. Each platform has a dispute interface. Each dispute needs the order ID, the disputed amount, the reason category, and supporting evidence. The platforms respond within 5-15 business days for most categories.

Step 5 — Reconcile the credits. Approved disputes show up as adjustments on a future billing cycle, not as immediate refunds. The reconciliation window is 14-30 days from filing for most categories, longer for marketing-fee disputes.

Cost of doing it manually: roughly 6 hours a month of CSR-grade clerical time once the workflow is set up — call it $300-450/month. Cost of doing it with Commission Reclaim: $49/month, no setup project, the audit runs against your statements every billing cycle, dispute filings get drafted for you, you approve them and click through.

The honest constraint

Not every overcharge is recoverable. About 30-40% of what the audit flags as a discrepancy turns out to be contractually permitted. What the audit gets right is the recovery rate on the disputable subset. On the 60-70% of flags that are genuinely platform-side errors, the platforms approve and credit somewhere between 75% and 90% of filed disputes.

A $30K/mo DoorDash operation, in the median, recovers around $3,400 per year through this process. The top quartile recovers $5,500+. The bottom quartile recovers $1,200. Nobody recovers zero, in the data I have run.

What to do this week

Pull last month's DoorDash statement. Open the CSV. Sort by Adjustment Type. Count how many rows have a "Marketplace Pricing Adjustment" or "Settlement Reconciliation Adjustment" line. If that count is more than 4% of your total order count, you have a meaningful recoverable position. Run the free Commission Reclaim audit against the trailing 14 months and the system will tell you the recoverable amount before you commit to anything.

DoorDash, UberEats, and Grubhub are not the villains in this story. They are billing systems at scale, making the same kind of systematic errors every billing system at scale makes, in the direction every billing system at scale makes them. The recovery process is mechanical, the dispute math holds up, and the dollars are sitting in your statements waiting to be claimed. The audit is free. Run it.