On-Demand Delivery Glossary · Commerce

86 (to 86 an item): restaurant slang for marking an item unavailable because it ran out; every platform has a separate, fast endpoint or webhook for it (Merchants, Menus & Catalogs).
Acceptance deadline: the time by which a merchant must accept or cancel an order before it escalates; DoorDash holds integration partners to merchant cancel and order failure rates below 1% (Orders, Dispatch & Batching).
All-in price: a price that includes every mandatory fee; required for advertised delivery service prices in California and handled by fee disclosure safe harbors in Minnesota and Colorado (Fees, Commissions & the Law).
Basic and enhanced service fees: New York City's categories for non-delivery merchant fees, capped at 5% and 20%, the enhanced fee allowed only if a basic plan is offered (Fees, Commissions & the Law).
Batching: giving one courier two or more orders on one trip; a trade-off between courier time per order and the later customer's wait, best set as an explicit, versioned weight (Orders, Dispatch & Batching).
Benefit application: the record that a membership offset a fee on an order, kept beside the fee itself so savings and program cost are sums (Subscriptions & Loyalty).
Busy mode: a merchant setting that adds prep time to incoming orders during a rush; Uber suggests 10 to 20 minutes (Orders, Dispatch & Batching).
Commission: the merchant's fee to a marketplace, a percentage of the order by plan, such as DoorDash's 15%, 25% or 30% (Fees, Commissions & the Law).
Commission cap: a city limit on what a delivery platform may charge a restaurant per order, such as New York City's 15% delivery fee cap and Portland's 15% and 4% (Fees, Commissions & the Law).
Core delivery service: San Francisco's term for delivery without advertising, search placement, consulting or card processing, which must be offered at 15% or less for the cap not to apply (Fees, Commissions & the Law).
Courier imminent: Uber Direct's flag that the courier is one minute from pickup or dropoff (Orders, Dispatch & Batching).
Delivery offer: an assignment proposed to a contractor courier, with pay, distance and an expiry; declines and timeouts return the delivery to the pool (Orders, Dispatch & Batching).
Error charge: the share of a customer refund passed to the merchant for a kitchen or store error, such as DoorDash's 25% to 100% of the item price plus tax, disputable within a window (Refunds, Missing Items & Fraud).
ETA (estimated time of delivery): the arrival time shown to the customer, a sum of predictions for acceptance, prep, courier arrival and travel, recomputed as the order progresses (Orders, Dispatch & Batching).
First-party ordering: a merchant taking orders on its own site or app, often through a vendor like Olo, with delivery by a logistics network (The Delivery Landscape).
Found rate: the share of ordered grocery items a shopper finds; the signal behind predicted availability (Merchants, Menus & Catalogs).
Global matching: assigning couriers by optimizing over all open orders and couriers together, instead of greedily per order as it arrives (Orders, Dispatch & Batching).
GOV and GTV: order value measures: DoorDash's Marketplace GOV ($102.0 billion in 2025) and Instacart's GTV ($37.2 billion), defined differently, so ratios built on them differ (The Delivery Landscape).
Greedy matching: assigning the best available courier to each order as it arrives, without considering other open orders (Orders, Dispatch & Batching).
Inventory file (full, delta, reinventory): a retailer's catalog upload; in full and delta files a missing row leaves an item unchanged, in a reinventory file it marks the item unavailable (Merchants, Menus & Catalogs).
Listing agreement: the merchant's written consent to be listed, required before listing in California and New York City (Merchants, Menus & Catalogs).
Logistics only (white-label delivery): delivery of orders taken on a merchant's own channels, such as DoorDash Drive and Uber Direct, priced per delivery (The Delivery Landscape).
Marketplace: an app listing many merchants that takes the order, charges the customer and the merchant, and usually delivers with its own couriers (The Delivery Landscape).
Markup: a higher in-app price than in-store, set by the merchant; California bars the platform from charging more than the restaurant's price (Merchants, Menus & Catalogs).
Membership: a monthly or yearly program (DashPass, Uber One, Instacart+, Grubhub+) that waives or reduces fees on eligible orders over a minimum (Subscriptions & Loyalty).
Menu publication: a record of the menu payload sent to a channel, with its hash and time, answering what a customer saw (Merchants, Menus & Catalogs).
Net Revenue Margin: DoorDash's revenue as a percentage of Marketplace GOV, 13.4% in 2025 (The Delivery Landscape).
Override (menu): a price, quantity or suspension that differs when an item appears in a particular menu, item or modifier group (Merchants, Menus & Catalogs).
Owned inventory: a model where the seller stocks its own micro-fulfillment centers and is the merchant, as Gopuff describes (The Delivery Landscape).
Pre-modifier: a modifier of a modifier ("no", "extra", "on the side"); among the fields Toast's DoorDash integration doesn't sync (Merchants, Menus & Catalogs).
Prep time: the time from acceptance to ready; nobody records it directly, so platforms start from the merchant's default and infer the rest (Orders, Dispatch & Batching).
Promotion abuse: using many accounts to claim per-person offers; enforced by linking devices, cards, addresses and phones at redemption (Refunds, Missing Items & Fraud).
Refund abuse: false missing-item or non-delivery reports, alone or through paid refund services; tied with promotion abuse as the top consumer-side fraud in one vendor's 2025 data (Refunds, Missing Items & Fraud).
Return delivery: a second fulfillment that brings an undeliverable order back; Uber Direct gives it its own ID prefixed ret_ (Orders, Dispatch & Batching).
Self-delivery: a marketplace listing whose orders the merchant's own drivers deliver, at a lower commission (The Delivery Landscape).
Shop and deliver: a shopper picks the order in a retailer's store, handles replacements and pays, then delivers, as on Instacart and Shipt (Orders, Dispatch & Batching).
Store pause: a temporary deactivation of a location on a channel; DoorDash treats every POS-initiated deactivation as temporary, defaulting to 14 days (Merchants, Menus & Catalogs).
Substitution: a replacement for an item the shopper couldn't find, chosen by preference or approval and recorded as a link from the original line (Merchants, Menus & Catalogs).
Tip: the customer's payment to the courier; paid in full as its own line and never used to offset guaranteed pay (Fees, Commissions & the Law).
Transaction fee: New York City's capped charge to restaurants for processing, 3% unless it equals the processor's charge to the platform (Fees, Commissions & the Law).
Trial conversion: a free membership period that becomes paid unless cancelled, the point state notice rules target (Subscriptions & Loyalty).
Unassignment: a courier dropping a delivery before pickup, which returns it to waiting; DoorDash's created state can recur (Orders, Dispatch & Batching).

86 (to 86 an item): restaurant slang for marking an item unavailable because it ran out; every platform has a separate, fast endpoint or webhook for it (Merchants, Menus & Catalogs).
Acceptance deadline: the time by which a merchant must accept or cancel an order before it escalates; DoorDash holds integration partners to merchant cancel and order failure rates below 1% (Orders, Dispatch & Batching).
All-in price: a price that includes every mandatory fee; required for advertised delivery service prices in California and handled by fee disclosure safe harbors in Minnesota and Colorado (Fees, Commissions & the Law).
Basic and enhanced service fees: New York City's categories for non-delivery merchant fees, capped at 5% and 20%, the enhanced fee allowed only if a basic plan is offered (Fees, Commissions & the Law).
Batching: giving one courier two or more orders on one trip; a trade-off between courier time per order and the later customer's wait, best set as an explicit, versioned weight (Orders, Dispatch & Batching).
Benefit application: the record that a membership offset a fee on an order, kept beside the fee itself so savings and program cost are sums (Subscriptions & Loyalty).
Busy mode: a merchant setting that adds prep time to incoming orders during a rush; Uber suggests 10 to 20 minutes (Orders, Dispatch & Batching).
Commission: the merchant's fee to a marketplace, a percentage of the order by plan, such as DoorDash's 15%, 25% or 30% (Fees, Commissions & the Law).
Commission cap: a city limit on what a delivery platform may charge a restaurant per order, such as New York City's 15% delivery fee cap and Portland's 15% and 4% (Fees, Commissions & the Law).
Core delivery service: San Francisco's term for delivery without advertising, search placement, consulting or card processing, which must be offered at 15% or less for the cap not to apply (Fees, Commissions & the Law).
Courier imminent: Uber Direct's flag that the courier is one minute from pickup or dropoff (Orders, Dispatch & Batching).
Delivery offer: an assignment proposed to a contractor courier, with pay, distance and an expiry; declines and timeouts return the delivery to the pool (Orders, Dispatch & Batching).
Error charge: the share of a customer refund passed to the merchant for a kitchen or store error, such as DoorDash's 25% to 100% of the item price plus tax, disputable within a window (Refunds, Missing Items & Fraud).
ETA (estimated time of delivery): the arrival time shown to the customer, a sum of predictions for acceptance, prep, courier arrival and travel, recomputed as the order progresses (Orders, Dispatch & Batching).
First-party ordering: a merchant taking orders on its own site or app, often through a vendor like Olo, with delivery by a logistics network (The Delivery Landscape).
Found rate: the share of ordered grocery items a shopper finds; the signal behind predicted availability (Merchants, Menus & Catalogs).
Global matching: assigning couriers by optimizing over all open orders and couriers together, instead of greedily per order as it arrives (Orders, Dispatch & Batching).
GOV and GTV: order value measures: DoorDash's Marketplace GOV ($102.0 billion in 2025) and Instacart's GTV ($37.2 billion), defined differently, so ratios built on them differ (The Delivery Landscape).
Greedy matching: assigning the best available courier to each order as it arrives, without considering other open orders (Orders, Dispatch & Batching).
Inventory file (full, delta, reinventory): a retailer's catalog upload; in full and delta files a missing row leaves an item unchanged, in a reinventory file it marks the item unavailable (Merchants, Menus & Catalogs).
Listing agreement: the merchant's written consent to be listed, required before listing in California and New York City (Merchants, Menus & Catalogs).
Logistics only (white-label delivery): delivery of orders taken on a merchant's own channels, such as DoorDash Drive and Uber Direct, priced per delivery (The Delivery Landscape).
Marketplace: an app listing many merchants that takes the order, charges the customer and the merchant, and usually delivers with its own couriers (The Delivery Landscape).
Markup: a higher in-app price than in-store, set by the merchant; California bars the platform from charging more than the restaurant's price (Merchants, Menus & Catalogs).
Membership: a monthly or yearly program (DashPass, Uber One, Instacart+, Grubhub+) that waives or reduces fees on eligible orders over a minimum (Subscriptions & Loyalty).
Menu publication: a record of the menu payload sent to a channel, with its hash and time, answering what a customer saw (Merchants, Menus & Catalogs).
Net Revenue Margin: DoorDash's revenue as a percentage of Marketplace GOV, 13.4% in 2025 (The Delivery Landscape).
Override (menu): a price, quantity or suspension that differs when an item appears in a particular menu, item or modifier group (Merchants, Menus & Catalogs).
Owned inventory: a model where the seller stocks its own micro-fulfillment centers and is the merchant, as Gopuff describes (The Delivery Landscape).
Pre-modifier: a modifier of a modifier ("no", "extra", "on the side"); among the fields Toast's DoorDash integration doesn't sync (Merchants, Menus & Catalogs).
Prep time: the time from acceptance to ready; nobody records it directly, so platforms start from the merchant's default and infer the rest (Orders, Dispatch & Batching).
Promotion abuse: using many accounts to claim per-person offers; enforced by linking devices, cards, addresses and phones at redemption (Refunds, Missing Items & Fraud).
Refund abuse: false missing-item or non-delivery reports, alone or through paid refund services; tied with promotion abuse as the top consumer-side fraud in one vendor's 2025 data (Refunds, Missing Items & Fraud).
Return delivery: a second fulfillment that brings an undeliverable order back; Uber Direct gives it its own ID prefixed ret_ (Orders, Dispatch & Batching).
Self-delivery: a marketplace listing whose orders the merchant's own drivers deliver, at a lower commission (The Delivery Landscape).
Shop and deliver: a shopper picks the order in a retailer's store, handles replacements and pays, then delivers, as on Instacart and Shipt (Orders, Dispatch & Batching).
Store pause: a temporary deactivation of a location on a channel; DoorDash treats every POS-initiated deactivation as temporary, defaulting to 14 days (Merchants, Menus & Catalogs).
Substitution: a replacement for an item the shopper couldn't find, chosen by preference or approval and recorded as a link from the original line (Merchants, Menus & Catalogs).
Tip: the customer's payment to the courier; paid in full as its own line and never used to offset guaranteed pay (Fees, Commissions & the Law).
Transaction fee: New York City's capped charge to restaurants for processing, 3% unless it equals the processor's charge to the platform (Fees, Commissions & the Law).
Trial conversion: a free membership period that becomes paid unless cancelled, the point state notice rules target (Subscriptions & Loyalty).
Unassignment: a courier dropping a delivery before pickup, which returns it to waiting; DoorDash's created state can recur (Orders, Dispatch & Batching).