Locations and zones

Locations and zones is where you define the physical geography of your delivery network — the pickup and dropoff locations orders move between, the zones that describe where you deliver, and the route restrictions that keep multi-stop routes out of areas they shouldn't enter. Everything here is about geography your organization owns and edits; dispatch and routing then read it to decide where an order can go and how a route should be planned.

Same map, different jobs

All three surfaces draw on the same idea — a place or an area on a map — but each one answers a different question:

• A location is a single point: a store you pick up from, or a recurring address you drop off to. You save it once and attach it to orders by name.
• A zone is a deliver-here area: a set of cities, zip codes, or a polygon you draw, paired with the locations it applies to. A zone can also be bound to an optimization strategy, so routing behaves differently inside it.
• A route restriction is an avoid-here area. It doesn't change what you deliver — it tells the route optimizer which places a multi-stop route must not enter.

That's the short version. For how these three share one underlying geography model, see How locations and zones work.

Where to find this

Locations, zones, and route restrictions live under Configure ▸ Network, as three separate pages: Locations, Zones, and Route Restrictions.

Note

Locations are available to every organization. Zones availability varies by organization — reach out to Nash for access. Route restrictions is a beta feature — reach out to Nash if you'd like early access.

What you can do

• How locations and zones work — the shared geography model behind all three surfaces, and how each one feeds dispatch or routing.
• Set up your pickup and dropoff locations — save the stores and addresses you attach to orders by name.
• Configure pickup labels — choose what prints on the pickup label for your organization.
• Pickup location settings reference — every field on the pickup location form, and when it appears.
• Manage zones — create the zones that describe where you deliver, and bind one to an optimization strategy.
• Zone coverage reference — 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.

Locations, zones, and restrictions don't dispatch or route by themselves

Saving a location, drawing a zone, or creating a route restriction only builds up the geography — none of it moves an order on its own. A location just needs to exist to be picked from a list. A zone changes routing only once it's bound to an optimization strategy. A route restriction does nothing at all until you attach it to an optimization strategy or pick it in the Optimize flow for a single run — see Optimization strategies and Optimize orders for where that attachment happens.

And it's the routing engine that reads all of this, not Nash acting on the map directly: Nash dispatches the order, and the optimizer plans the route within the geography you've defined — a provider, or your own fleet, is who actually drives it.