Who is actually driving the food?
Before the word dispatch means anything, settle who is in the car. There are three answers, and a lot of restaurants run two of them at once.
Your own driver
You hire, schedule, insure and pay someone. Total control over the handoff and the customer experience, total exposure to a slow Tuesday when that person is paid to stand still. Works well for a tight radius and a predictable dinner rush.
One courier contract
You sign with a single delivery company and every order goes to that company. Simple to reason about, and fine until the one Friday their driver supply in your zip code runs dry, because there is nowhere for the order to go.
Aggregated dispatch
Software holds relationships with several courier networks and offers each order out until one accepts. You contract with the aggregator, not with five courier companies. This is what most people now mean by the word dispatch.
The important thing to see is that dispatch buys a driver, not a customer. That is the whole difference between it and a delivery marketplace, and it is where the money is.
What happens between checkout and the doorbell?
Six steps. Each one has a failure that operators recognize immediately once it is named.
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The diner checks out
The order is captured with an address, a phone number and any delivery notes. Nothing has been offered to a driver yet, which is why an address typo caught here costs nothing and the same typo caught later costs a remake.
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The restaurant accepts and sets a prep time
This number is the whole ballgame. Dispatch uses your prep time to decide when to send a driver. Say ten minutes when you mean twenty five and the driver stands at your counter for fifteen minutes, which is how restaurants get quietly deprioritized by driver pools.
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The order is offered to a courier network
The dispatch layer sends the job out with the pickup address, the ready time and the drop address. On an aggregated setup it can cascade: if the first network has nobody nearby, it falls back to the next one automatically instead of failing.
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A driver accepts and is assigned
The order now has a named driver and an ETA, which flows back to your tablet and to the diner tracking link. This is the first moment anyone can honestly promise a delivery time.
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Pickup
The driver arrives, confirms the order number and leaves. The common failure here is a crowded pass with no marked pickup shelf, which turns a thirty second handoff into a three minute conversation, every single order.
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Drop off and proof
The courier records the delivery, often with a photo. That record is what settles the argument two hours later when a diner says the food never came. Keep it: it is the only evidence in the chain that you do not control.
Why does dispatch change the economics?
On a delivery marketplace, the driver is bundled into the commission. You pay a share of the ticket, typically 15 to 30 percent base and 25 to 35 percent blended once in app marketing and card processing are counted, and part of what you are buying inside that number is a driver. On a $40 order at 30 percent, that is $12, and it scales with the size of the order even though the drive is the same distance either way.
Dispatch on a direct order unbundles it. The delivery becomes a per delivery cost rather than a percentage, and a per delivery cost does not care whether the bag holds one shawarma or a family platter. That is why delivery on your own channel gets relatively cheaper as ticket size grows, and why restaurants with a high average check have the most to gain from moving delivery in house.
The courier fee itself is a separate line from your software. On Zayos, the diner pays a flat $2.99 platform service fee on a delivery order and the restaurant keeps 100 percent of the food revenue and tips. The courier charge is configured separately: passed through at checkout, absorbed by the restaurant above a basket minimum, or avoided entirely on orders your own driver takes.
What do people get wrong about dispatch?
"Using DoorDash Drive means I am back on DoorDash." No. Drive is the courier service sold without the listing. There is no menu on the app, no commission on the order and no customer handover. You are buying the driver network and nothing else.
"Dispatch guarantees me a driver." It does not, and no honest vendor claims it does. What aggregation buys is more places to look, so the odds of a stall drop sharply. Ask any vendor what happens on the failed case, because the answer tells you whether they have run a real Friday.
"The diner will understand it was the driver's fault." They will not. A late delivery is remembered as your late delivery, which is the strongest argument for keeping prep times honest and the pickup handoff fast.
How does Zayos dispatch a direct order?
Zayos routes direct delivery orders through Otter Dispatch, which cascades across DoorDash Drive, Uber Direct, Relay, Roadie and more than a dozen other courier networks and falls back automatically when one has nobody available. The restaurant does not contract with each network separately. Coverage spans most of the country, and where an address falls outside it, the order hands off to your own driver on the same ticket and the same tablet. Ask us to check your real delivery addresses before you sign.
Next: what a direct ordering channel is, how Otter integration works, and what DoorDash charges restaurants.