Run deliveries across your city

A delivery app is the software that runs your deliveries from the moment an order arrives to the moment it is handed over. It is usually four parts working together: ordering for customers, a merchant or outlet view, a rider app and a dispatch screen for your team.

Ordering can be your own app, your website, WhatsApp or your online store. The merchant view is where a shop or an outlet sees its orders and marks them ready. The rider app tells each rider what to pick up, where to take it and how to close the delivery. The dispatch screen shows every order and every rider on one map, so the team steps in only when something needs a person.

What makes it work is not any one screen but the rules between them: which rider takes which order, when to send them, what happens when an address is wrong, and how cash collected at the door gets back to the right account.

It pays off first for businesses that already deliver every day and feel the strain: pharmacies, grocery and sweet shops, restaurants and cloud kitchens, bakeries, distributors delivering to retailers, and startups that deliver for other businesses.

The signs are familiar. Orders are written on a pad, a shop boy closes the counter to deliver, riders carry one order at a time, and customers call to ask where their order is. For restaurants there is another cost: aggregators take a commission on every order, including orders from regulars who would happily order directly. Delivery startups have a different need: they deliver for many merchants, so the merchant app, pricing and settlement matter as much as the rider app.

For a restaurant chain in Kochi, we built a branded ordering app and website, a kitchen display that gathers every channel onto one screen, and a rider app with live tracking. Each outlet delivers within its own area, so every order goes to the nearest kitchen, and regular customers order directly instead of through an aggregator.

The dispatch engine decides which rider takes which order, and in what order. A simple version offers each order to the nearest free rider. A stronger one plans trips.

For a delivery startup we back in Jaipur, the engine groups orders that are close together and ready at around the same time into one trip, predicts when a restaurant order will actually be ready so the rider arrives as it comes out of the kitchen, and plans for busy hours and festival peaks around Diwali and Teej so riders are where the orders will be. Every trip that carries two orders instead of one makes each delivery cheaper.

We start with rules your team already uses and add batching and prediction when there are enough orders to learn from. Dispatchers can always override the engine, and every override is a lesson for the next version of the rules.

Riders need an app that is quick, clear and forgiving. It shows the next pickup and drop, opens navigation, and asks for only a few taps: accepted, picked up, delivered. It should run well on low-cost Android phones, because that is what most riders carry; the Jaipur rider app was built for exactly that.

At the door, the rider closes the delivery with the customer’s OTP, a photo or a signature, and records any cash or UPI payment collected. Lanes, basements and lifts often have no signal, so the app saves everything on the phone and sends it when the network returns. Riders can see their trips, collections and earnings for the day, which answers most of their questions before they reach the office.

Customers and shops should be able to order the way they already do. Many small businesses in India take orders on WhatsApp, so the app can accept a pickup and drop sent as a WhatsApp message and create the order without anyone opening an app.

Online stores can book a delivery for every order through a plugin or an API, and your billing software can do the same. Sellers on ONDC, India’s open network for digital commerce, can book your riders too; the Jaipur startup’s platform is connected to ONDC for that reason. Addresses are confirmed with a pin on the map, so riders stop calling for directions.

Live tracking answers the question customers call about most. Once a rider picks up an order, the customer gets a link and follows the rider on a map to the door, with a message at each step: accepted, picked up, on the way, delivered.

Messages go out on WhatsApp, SMS or as app notifications, whichever the customer uses. When something goes wrong, the message matters even more: a delayed order, a wrong address or a failed attempt should reach the customer straight away with a way to fix it, rather than a rider waiting at a locked gate.

Cash on delivery is still common, and it is where money quietly goes missing. The rider app records every cash or UPI payment against its order, and at the end of the day each rider’s collections are matched to the orders they delivered.

Differences show up order by order, the same evening, instead of at a monthly count. If you deliver for other businesses, the same records drive their settlement: the Jaipur startup reconciles collections every evening and settles to each merchant’s bank account the next day. Rider payouts, by trip, distance or shift, are counted from the same trips, so nobody argues about the numbers.

Where you deliver and what you charge should be settings, not code. Delivery zones are drawn on the map, each outlet or hub covers its own area, and prices can follow distance, the size of the order or the time slot.

Customers choose instant delivery, same-day delivery or a scheduled slot. An address just outside the instant zone can be offered a later slot rather than refused. When you open a new area, you draw it, set its prices and assign its riders, and it is live the same day.

Rider shifts follow the same map. Each rider works a zone or a hub, the dispatch screen shows who is on shift and where, and busy hours are covered by adding riders to the zones that need them rather than to the whole city.

We need your current orders, your delivery area and an owner on your side. Recent orders, with their addresses and times, show us where demand really is. Your area and rules, such as minimum orders, cut-off times and how cash is handled, become the settings. The owner is usually whoever runs deliveries today and can decide what the riders and counter staff need.

Before we build, we agree how success will be measured: time from order to door, orders per trip, failed deliveries, cash differences and calls asking where an order is. We watch those measures during the pilot, and the rest of the business moves over when they look right to you.

A delivery app is best launched where you can watch it closely. In Kochi, one outlet ran the whole system first while we tuned the kitchen display with its chefs and the rider app with its riders; every other outlet then switched in turn.

After launch we run the system with you. We tune the dispatch rules as patterns change, add zones and channels, fix what riders and customers report, and keep the apps working as phones, maps and payment providers change. The Jaipur startup is taking the same playbook to Udaipur and Jodhpur next: merchants first, a local rider team and the same dispatch engine.