Order Scheduling

Tips & Best Practices
1

When should I send my order to Stuart?
You can send your delivery order (a “job” in Stuart’s langage) to us as soon as it’s placed by your end customer. Depending on your business you may wait for the restaurant / store / warehouse to confirm that they will/can fulfil the order before sending it to Stuart.

Should I create an instant or scheduled delivery?
By default, jobs are instant, but you can also schedule a job, see more details on these options in “How to schedule a job?”

We recommend that you schedule all of your orders using the ‘pickup_at’ to indicate the time that you would like the Stuart driver to arrive at the pickup location. Note that the latest time to schedule a pickup is 15 mins before the end time of Stuart operational hours for the given zone. You can find this value through our get scheduling slots endpoint.

How can I account for order preparation?
We advise that you account for food preparation / picking & packing time in this order scheduling to ensure that the order is ready to be picked-up when the driver arrives. For hot food or cold chain groceries this can be particularly important.

For scheduled orders where the customer selected a time slot in the future, you can schedule the Stuart order with the pickup at the start of the time window, or slightly earlier if you prefer. On average our drivers take 10-20 mins to deliver.
Here is an example:

Delivery time window: 13:00 - 13:30
Preparation time: 15mins
Stuart job “pickup_at”: 13:00
Start preparing at delivery time window start minus preparation time: 12:45

Note: By default, jobs will only be able to be scheduled up to 6 days in advance. In order to increase the number of days allowed, please contact a relevant account manager to discuss your requirements.

For asap orders:
If you want to prepare the order as soon as it comes in, to be delivered as soon as possible, simply create a Stuart job using the following logic:

pickup_at = now + preparation time

How can I reduce driver waiting time at pickup?
If you subscribe to our delivery webhook updates you can use our 'almost_picking’ status to let the restaurant know that the driver is arriving. This status is triggered when the driver enters a radius that can be set up in your account, by default this radius is 35 meters.

How can I ensure my delivery time window is met?

  • If you would like our driver to have visibility of the delivery time window, you can add this to the ‘dropoff[0].comments’ field of the job creation request.

  • If you would like to provide Stuart with your delivery time window information for reporting, support processes or any other reason, use the ‘end_customer_time_window_start’ and ‘end_customer_time_window_end’ parameters of the job creation request.

  • If you’d like to further discuss contractual agreements regarding delivery time windows, cold chain delivery, and so on, please contact your commercial point of contact or ‘get in touch’ on our website https://stuart.com/.

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