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Zones

Zones are the geographic foundation of your marketplace. A zone is an area you serve — a city, a district, a neighborhood cluster — and every outlet lives inside one. When a customer opens your app, their location determines which zone they’re in, and therefore which merchants, settings, and delivery options they see.

Why zones matter

Section titled “Why zones matter”

Zones let one marketplace behave differently in different places:

  • Coverage — customers outside every zone see that you don’t serve their area yet, instead of a broken experience.
  • Relevance — customers only see outlets that actually serve their location.
  • Local control — operating rules and delivery settings can vary per zone, so your downtown launch zone and your suburban expansion zone don’t have to share one configuration.
  • Expansion — entering a new city is a matter of creating a new zone and onboarding outlets into it, not re-architecting the marketplace.

Creating a zone

Section titled “Creating a zone”

From Dashboard → Zones (/zone/list):

  1. Create the zone (/zone/add/new) and give it a clear name (customers may see zone-related context, and your team will reference it constantly in reports and configuration).
  2. Draw the zone’s geographic boundary on the map. This boundary defines where the zone “is” for customer matching.
  3. Open the zone’s management area (/zone/manage/:zoneID/home) and configure its settings (below).
  4. Add outlets to the zone — either by creating new outlets inside it or during merchant onboarding. See Outlets.

Zone-level settings

Section titled “Zone-level settings”

Each zone’s management area (/zone/manage/:zoneID/home) carries its own configuration, including:

  • Zone dashboard — per-zone performance overview, on the zone’s home page.
  • Operating rules — zone-level logic and defaults that apply to outlets within it, configurable per business type — so restaurants and supermarkets in the same zone can run different rules.
  • Service areas — delivery coverage and fee rules that outlets in the zone can inherit, also defined per business type (see next section).

Outlet-level settings can override zone defaults where the platform allows it, so a single outlet with unusual needs doesn’t force a zone-wide change.

Service areas and delivery coverage

Section titled “Service areas and delivery coverage”

Within a zone, service areas define exactly where delivery is offered and what it costs:

  • A service area is a shape on the map (or distance-based coverage) with its own delivery fee rules.
  • Service areas can be defined at the zone level, per business type — shared by that vertical’s outlets in the zone, at Dashboard → Zones → (zone) → Service Area (/zone/manage/:zoneID/service-area/:bizID/list) — or per outlet as an override for merchants with their own delivery radius (on the outlet’s own Service Area page).
  • Multiple service areas can be stacked with an ordering, so the first active area that matches the customer’s location wins. This enables patterns like “cheap delivery nearby, higher fee farther out.”
  • Delivery fees support multiple calculation modes (for example flat fees or distance-based fees), configured per service area.

When a customer sets a delivery address, the platform checks which service area (if any) covers that address for each outlet — outlets that can’t deliver there are filtered out or shown as unavailable for delivery.

How customers are matched to a zone

Section titled “How customers are matched to a zone”
  1. The customer app determines the customer’s location — from device location or a saved/entered address.
  2. The platform finds the zone whose boundary contains that location.
  3. The customer sees the merchants, business types, and content for that zone.
  4. When ordering for delivery, the chosen address is further checked against each outlet’s service area for availability and fees.

If the customer’s location falls outside all zones, they’re informed the marketplace doesn’t serve their area yet — a good prompt to capture demand for future expansion.

Zones, business types, and outlets — how they fit

Section titled “Zones, business types, and outlets — how they fit”
Marketplace
└── Zone (geography)            e.g. "Downtown"
    └── Outlets (merchants)     e.g. "Mario's Pizza", "FreshMart"
        └── each outlet belongs to a Business Type (vertical)
            e.g. Restaurants, Supermarkets
  • A zone answers where.
  • A business type answers what kind of merchant.
  • An outlet is the merchant location itself.

Customers are first placed in a zone, then browse it by business type, then order from an outlet.

Practical guidance

Section titled “Practical guidance”
  • Start with one zone. Launching with a single well-covered zone beats three thin ones. Add zones as merchant density justifies them.
  • Don’t overlap zone boundaries. Each location should resolve to one zone to keep the customer experience predictable.
  • Review coverage after onboarding waves. As outlets join, check the zone dashboard and delivery coverage to spot gaps between where customers are and where merchants deliver.
  • Use per-outlet service areas sparingly. Zone-level service areas are easier to maintain; reserve outlet overrides for genuinely different cases.
Section titled “Related pages”