Paste the ticket, send a driver

There is a moment every small restaurant knows. The order is taken — on the phone, through the shop's own site, in a message — and then somebody has to carry it. You either stop what you are doing and drive it yourself, or you hand the customer to somebody else's app and pay for the privilege.

Partner pickups are the third answer. You keep the order and the customer. You borrow the driver.

Nobody retypes the address

The merchant's own system already knows where the food is going. Making somebody type it again, into a second app, at the exact moment the kitchen is loudest, is how a delivery ends up on the wrong street.

So you don't. You paste the order into one box — the ticket, the confirmation email, the message the customer sent — or you photograph the ticket coming off the kitchen printer. The address, the customer's name, their phone and the order number are read out of it. The photo is read on our own machines; it is not handed to anyone else's service.

Everything it finds is a suggestion

What comes back is a card to glance at, with every field one tap from a fix. Nothing is assumed quietly. One wrong address costs more trust than ten "check this" prompts, so the form would rather ask.

Your shop's own pin is always the pickup — that is the whole point of being your courier, and it is also what makes "Main St" mean your Main St rather than one forty miles away.

The price, before anyone is called

You see the run priced from your counter to their door before you send it: the fare, which goes to the driver, plus a flat 99¢. Not a percentage of the order. A twelve-dollar lunch and a two-hundred-dollar catering run cost the same to arrange, so they cost the same to arrange.

For the driver, it is just another job

Same offer ring, same map, same proof at the door, same rating at the end. The only difference is where it came from: handed over a counter instead of placed inside Cyca. Drivers choose whether they take them at all — partner pickups are one of four kinds of work you can switch on and off.

It lives in your shop's Delivery tab, as Request a pickup. Your shop needs a pin on the map first. The full write-up is here.