Actors

Merchant

A seller who fulfills orders for end customers. The retail, e-commerce, and restaurant flavor of shipper. Lives at the intersection of inventory, brand, and customer experience.

Where this fits

The people, brands, and counterparties Nash coordinates across. Operators set the rules, dispatchers run the live loop, drivers move the order, and merchants own the promise the customer paid for. Every actor sees the surface designed for their role.

Related terms

Shipper: The company sending the goods. Customer of a 3PL or carrier; originator of the order, owner of the SLA, payer for the move. Same role is often called the merchant in retail and e-commerce flavor and shipper in freight and logistics flavor.
Brand: The consumer-facing identity that owns the relationship with the buyer. Different from the seller and different from the carrier: a brand is what the customer thinks they bought from, regardless of who picked, packed, or drove the delivery. Nash treats brand surfaces (tracking pages, notifications) as merchant-controlled, not carrier-controlled.
Customer: The end recipient of the delivery. The person at the door, the curbside spot, the office desk. The party whose experience determines repeat purchase, NPS, and the rest of the post-purchase economics.
Operator: Nash's word for the human running the dispatch console. Could be a retail operations lead, a restaurant manager, a fleet supervisor, a 3PL ops director. The person who sets the rules the platform optimizes against and intervenes when an exception fires.
Dispatcher: The operator role focused on the live assignment loop: deciding which driver or carrier handles which job, re-routing on the fly, resolving exceptions in real time. Sometimes a dedicated person, sometimes a hat the operator wears.