Overview
This is a summary of the important best practices that quick commerce delivery operators typically implement and which we recommend following.
Before getting access to your custom account, ideally you should have some experience testing the various features in MotionTools during your trial. Here we present some tips for optimizing your bookings and account set up for smoother, more effective operations.
- Service areas
- Bookings model
- Stops model
- Saved places
- Organizations
- Booking attributes
- Custom content
- Metadata
- Manual tour building via 1-click stacking
Service areas
Create small, multiple service areas around your hubs
A service area is used to validate bookings on creation, making sure that bookings are within the region where your business operates and helps dashboard users (Admins, Org managers) simplify the filtering and viewing of bookings within a certain region.
Typically, you would have multiple dark stores/ hubs across a region and/ or multiple cities where your team manages deliveries. The recommended service area set up for this industry is to create one service area per hub (200m radius around the hub) instead of having just one large service area across multiple hubs.
Why does it matter? Having a service area created for each hub ensures that orders get created in the correct service area. Additionally, you get a better overview of bookings per hub by filtering different service areas. Lastly, service areas limit the visibility of bookings to drivers, so that your drivers see only bookings that matter to them. Read Best practices for managing multiple hubs for quick commerce delivery for more details.
Bookings model
Bookings for delivery services would usually start with a pickup stop and end with a drop-off stop, where the driver travels from point to point to complete the delivery.
However, the journey of a driver/ rider for quick commerce delivery service looks like this:
- Driver waits for incoming orders at or around the hub
- Picks up the orders and starts the booking to drop-off orders
- Returns to hub after the booking is completed
Since drivers don’t spend time travelling to the hub for collection, implementing a pickup stop as the first stop would be redundant. At the same time, it is important to track how long each driver takes to return to the hub after completing the delivery. As such, bookings usually start with a drop-off stop and ends at the hub as the last stop, instead of the typical pickup stop → drop-off stop booking model.
Why does it matter? Imagine 1-stop bookings e.g. only having a drop-off stop in a booking would mean that once the delivery is completed, drivers become available at the customer’s door instead of becoming available when they finally reach the hub. This would likely cause issues as the next booking might be assigned or be available for picking again without drivers being physically present at the hub for collection. Secondly, 1-stop bookings don’t provide you visibility into the average return-to-hub duration which could be useful for planning your operations. Implementing a 3-stop booking (pickup → drop-off → pickup) means more effort when swiping for your drivers which simply isn’t time effective.
Stops model
Stop mode: Express stop
The default flow of a driver completing a regular stop requires two swipes — the first swipe when the driver has arrived, and the second swipe when the stop is completed. When the stop mode is set to “express” i.e. single_step, MotionTools transitions the stop to done state as soon as your driver confirms arrival, eliminating the second swipe.
Why does it matter? This is a way to increase efficiency of your drivers by marking certain stops as “express” stops in the booking stop flow, where drivers just have to swipe once for confirmation instead of swiping multiple times per stop.
Stop mode: Stop groups
When stacking multiple bookings in a tour that includes stops pointing to the same location e.g. the hub, drivers would usually have to swipe multiple times to complete the same stop even if they have reached their destination. With the “stop groups” feature, you can group multiple stops together and allow drivers to complete them all at once.
Why does it matter? Grouping the same stops together e.g. all return to hub stops as the last stop in a stacked tour ensures a smoother driver experience compared to them completing stops chronologically. Read Grouping of booking stops to learn how to implement this feature to your bookings.
Saved places
Saved places are pre-registered, known locations in MotionTools. As drivers would return to the hub as the last stop of the booking as explained in Bookings model, the Saved place feature is normally used to pre-fill stops that represent the hub.
Why does it matter? Instead of entering the full address on the second stop that points back to the hub, this feature allows Admins to pre-register each hub with the full address as a saved place and reuse this saved place on each booking. Using saved places help admins and drivers identify hubs more easily because when a hub is defines as a stop, all details (hub name, address, contact details) saved in the hub will then be reflected on the stop.
Organizations
Organizations can help you manage orders, drivers and vehicle fleet with the multiple hubs by assigning an Org manager to look after one or more hubs. When creating bookings via API, it is important to attach the organizations id in your bookings so that they become visible to org managers.
Why does it matter? Org managers have limited access to information in the dashboard. This means that org managers are strictly confined to bookings, customers and drivers that belong to their assigned organizations. Failure to attach the organizations id to your bookings would mean that the org manager would not see the bookings at all in the dashboard. You can read more about the permissions of an org manager here. To find out how to attach the organizations_id in your API request, read here.
Booking attributes
Location name
This field allows you to define the name of a location such as a publicly known place or a place of interest, which you can use this feature to give drivers more details about the stop e.g. Airport/ Office/ Museum.
Additional address line
To show more address details such as apartment number, room, landmark to drivers, using the additional address line field gives you more options to display these information.
Additional information (stop level)
This field is useful for giving drivers specific instructions which are specific to a stop of a booking. For example, the recipient is supposed to hand over cash at the drop-off stop and using this field helps you to communicate important information through the app at each stop e.g. Cash on delivery, collect 30€.
Why does it matter? Using this field would show as “Note to driver” in the driver app, which is a clearer way of communicating instructions directly to drivers at each stop.
Additional information (booking level)
The additional information field on booking level displays the booking details immediately in the app, without having the driver to start the booking.
Why does it matter? MotionTools hides personal identifiable information from drivers for past bookings, cancelled and inactive bookings. This means that the information stored in additional address line, additional information on stop level and contact details at stop will not be visible to the driver, until the booking is started. Typically, we use this field to indicate important information of a booking such as Order ID, so that drivers can prepare and collect the right orders before actually starting the booking.
Custom content
Custom content provides the option to add additional information into a booking, facilitating communication and interaction with drivers via the MotionTools app.
Why does it matter? Custom content is a powerful feature that allows you to store content, either as a text note, a URL link, a checklist or a pop-up screen. This is a scalable approach to add highly customizable content and actions to your bookings, and prevent the misusing of other fields present in the booking attributes. To learn how custom content works and how to implement it, read here.
Metadata
Metadata unlocks vast integration possibilities and could be used from simple cases where an external tracking ID is added to a booking, to more complex cases where metadata could be used to define behaviour not supported by MotionTools out of the box, such as organizing drivers into teams by criteria defined by you and stored in metadata as properties on the user account.
Why does it matter? Bookings that are created programmatically would typically need custom attributes added to bookings. The most common use cases is adding external booking IDs, stop IDs or purchase order numbers. Using a metadata parameter to attach key-value data to bookings and booking stops would prevent you from misusing other fields such as additional comments to store content which you cannot efficiently query. Metadata values are searchable, so attaching it to bookings and stops essentially helps you to locate the booking by searching the external ID.
Manual tour building via 1-click stacking
Quick commerce delivery operators typically stack multiple bookings that are in the same vicinity to maximize the driver’s capacity per trip. Learn how to build tours manually using the 1-click stacking feature here.
