Franchises

Franchises let a merchant who operates several locations — a restaurant chain, a multi-branch pharmacy, a supermarket group — run them as one business on your marketplace. Each location stays a normal outlet with its own catalog, team, service area, and live orders; the franchise is the layer that lets one owner work across all of them.

What a franchise is (and isn’t)

A franchise is a group of outlets under a franchise owner. It changes who can see and manage the outlets — it doesn’t merge them.
Each outlet in the franchise keeps its own zone, business type, catalog, pricing, staff, and orders.
Customers don’t see franchises; they see outlets. The chain’s “Mario’s Pizza — Downtown” and “Mario’s Pizza — Airport” remain separate storefronts that happen to share an owner.

Use a franchise when one legal merchant runs multiple locations. Don’t reach for it for unrelated merchants who merely share a name.

Setting up a franchise

Open Dashboard → Settings → Misc → Franchise (/franchise/list) and create the franchise.
Add the merchant’s outlets to it — existing outlets, or new ones as you onboard more branches.
Set up the franchise owner’s account (and any additional franchise users) so they’re linked to the franchise rather than a single outlet.

From then on, onboarding the chain’s next branch is just: create the outlet, add it to the franchise.

What franchise owners get

Franchise owners and their users sign in to the partner app once and work across every outlet in the franchise:

Outlet selector — switch between their locations inside the app, no separate accounts or sign-outs.
Per-location operations — within each outlet, the usual partner-app workflow: live orders, availability, catalog (to the extent you delegate it), reports.
Franchise-specific order acceptance — order acceptance can follow franchise-specific behavior, fitting chains where acceptance is handled at the brand level rather than purely per branch.
Assign Aggregator Driver — where this feature is enabled for your marketplace, franchise users see the Assign Aggregator Driver action for handing deliveries to an aggregator fleet.

What they don’t get: anything outside their franchise. Other merchants’ outlets, marketplace settings, and platform configuration stay invisible.

What stays with you

From the admin panel your team still controls:

Which outlets belong to which franchise.
Zone and business type configuration the chain operates within.
Commission, charges, and settlement per outlet — see Commission & charges.
Outlet approval for each new branch, like any other outlet.

Chain onboarding checklist

Franchise created at Dashboard → Settings → Misc → Franchise (/franchise/list)
Each branch onboarded as a normal outlet — profile, approval, payments, service area, catalog (see Outlets)
All branches added to the franchise
Franchise owner account linked and signed in to the partner app
Owner shown the outlet selector and walked through switching branches
Commission and settlement confirmed per outlet
Test order placed at each branch

Franchises vs multi-outlet ordering

Easy to confuse, completely different features:

	Franchises	Multi-outlet ordering
Who it’s for	The merchant side — one owner, many locations	The customer side — one cart, many outlets
What it groups	Outlets under one management account	Items from several outlets into one checkout

A marketplace can run both, either, or neither.

Outlets — onboarding each location
Multi-outlet ordering — the customer-side counterpart
Zones — where the chain’s branches live
Users & roles — account types across the platform