I'd like to mention that Onfleet provides delivery infrastructure today, spanning operational components (realtime dashboard, logistics backend, driver apps) through the end-customer experience (SMS notifications, ETA, driver tracking) and more (disclosure: I am Co-founder & CTO at Onfleet). https://onfleet.com
The Postmates API is certainly an option for businesses.
Often, however, it's quite expensive. Our customers save a significant amount of money by executing deliveries first-party or by delegating to a partner organization.
Additionally, we strive to give businesses complete control of their branding and of the recipient experience even while delegating tasks to another organization. For example, we offer a quite customizable recipient tracking page and SMS and voice proxying to hide customer and driver phone numbers. There are more details about these features on the features page (https://onfleet.com/features) and sprinkled through our API docs but feel free to reach out if you have any questions: http://docs.onfleet.com/
Hey, flatjaf. We don't offer first-party delivery but we do allow you to delegate work to "executor" organizations through our connections feature. For example, Meadow uses this feature to assign tasks to their partner dispensaries. Likewise, this can be used to work seamlessly with third-party executors like couriers.
David, here, CTO & Co-founder at Onfleet. We're quite busy on a number of improvements touching on some of your points.
We released dynamic filtering based on delay time recently which is our first foray into exception-driven dispatching for large volume customers. There's a lot more to come here!
While we think of tasks as the smallest atomic unit of work for a driver -- and so we like to imagine that at most one can be active for a given driver at once -- we're rolling out dependencies soon and will be exposing configurable notifications that support these cases.
Additionally, the concept you mention around exposing ETAs for future but inactive tasks is in the pipeline. The biggest challenges here are around privacy for the driver and other customers and we'll be sure to put a lot of consideration into balancing visibility and privacy.
Often, in the on-demand space, it's common to see companies which expose the driver's location to a customer as they make deliveries to other customers. We do want to allow this feature but it's essential for us that alternatives which better protect customer information are available.