Zones

A zone is a named geographic area you define once and reuse — the shape of the ground you serve. You build it by drawing polygons on a map or by listing coverage (countries, states, cities, ZIP or postal codes, or city-and-ZIP pairs), then attach it to one or more store locations. In the portal, the Zones surface manages your "zones and coverage areas."

The important thing to hold onto is that a zone decides nothing on its own. It's a description of where, and it sits inert until something downstream reads it. Three different systems do: an internal fleet reads zones to decide which orders it can pick up and drop off; delivery windows are scoped per zone; and route optimization can attach a strategy to a zone. Zones define where; fleets, delivery windows, and strategies reference zones to decide who, when, and how.

What a zone carries

Each zone saves a name, an optional external ID, its coverage area (any mix of countries, states, cities, ZIP codes, city-and-ZIP pairs, and drawn polygons), the store locations it covers — optionally date-bounded — an attached optimization strategy, free-form metadata, tags, and an active/inactive flag. The Zones screen has four tabs — Zones, Coverage, Restrictions, and Audit Log — and from it you create and edit zones, draw coverage on a map, import and export via CSV, filter and sort, and bulk-enable or disable delivery windows across zones.

Where to find this

Zones live under Configure ▸ Network ▸ Zones.

Note

Zones availability varies by organization — reach out to Nash for access. Everything about how a zone works is the same once you have it; whether the Zones surface appears at all is the part that varies.

What you can do

• How zones work — the mechanism behind the page: how a zone defines where, and how fleets, delivery windows, and strategies read it to decide who, when, and how.
• Manage zones — create, edit, filter, and import or export the zones that describe where you deliver.
• Define zone coverage — every coverage category on a zone, how polygon drawing works, and the export fields.
• Create route restrictions (avoid areas) — draw avoid-areas for the route optimizer and attach them to a strategy. A route restriction is a distinct feature from a zone, grouped here because both are areas you draw on a map for your network.

Zones and route restrictions: same map, opposite jobs

The Zones object also owns route restrictions, and it's worth being clear that they are two different things. A zone is a deliver-here area that downstream systems read to decide who and when. A route restriction is an avoid-here area you draw for the route optimizer — it doesn't change what you deliver; it tells the optimizer which places a multi-stop route must not enter, and it only takes effect once you attach it to an optimization strategy or pick it in the Optimize flow. They live in the same object because both are areas you draw for your network, not because they do the same job.

How zones relate to locations

Zones and locations are the two halves of your network's geography. A location is a single point — a store you pick up from or an address you drop off to. A zone is an area — the ground you cover — attached to the locations it applies to. You draw the zone here; you save the locations there; a zone earns its keep only once it's attached to a location and something downstream reads it.

Zones don't dispatch or route by themselves

Drawing a zone only builds up the geography — none of it moves an order on its own. A zone changes which fleet can take an order, scopes a delivery window, or shapes a route only once a fleet, a window, or a strategy references it. Address-to-zone resolution runs behind the scenes; the portal is configuration only. And Nash dispatches the order — a provider or your own fleet is who actually performs the delivery.