Industries

Delivery slot

Grocery. The window a shopper books at checkout for a delivery, usually two or four hours, or a recurring slot held at the same time each week. A slot is a promise made before the order is picked, so the capacity behind it has to be reserved ahead: seven days or more for recurring slots, recalibrated as demand moves. Offering slots the network cannot run is how a grocer ends up with packed baskets and no driver.

Where this fits

Vertical-specific patterns shared by the operators Nash serves. BOPIS, click-and-collect, cold chain, ship-from-store, catering windows, multi-marketplace. Each carries operational nuance that Nash absorbs without forcing the operation to bend to the software.

Related terms

Service window: Field services, B2B. The scheduled arrival window a customer is given (e.g., between 1pm and 3pm Tuesday). The narrower the window, the more pressure on dispatch precision and the more painful a missed slot.
Multi-marketplace: Restaurants. A merchant taking orders from several third-party delivery channels simultaneously alongside their own first-party flow. Each channel has its own SLA shape and dispatch logic; Nash absorbs the chaos into one orchestration plane the kitchen actually sees.
Empty miles: Transportation & Logistics. Distance driven without cargo, which drivers and dispatchers call deadhead. The single biggest source of preventable cost waste in trucking. Industry average runs 15-25%; the right dispatch logic compresses it.
Catering: Restaurants. Scheduled-in-advance, large-format orders for events, offices, and gatherings. Different SLA shape than on-demand: less time-critical at fulfillment, more time-critical on the drop, often with setup and serving requirements at delivery.
Backhaul: Transportation & Logistics. The return leg of a trip. A truck that drops an excavator at a jobsite or a pallet at a store usually drives back empty, and that leg is already paid for. Loading it with a transfer, a return or a pickup is the cheapest capacity in the network. Nash checks the day's routes for return legs and plans transfers onto them before booking a new trip.