Glossary
Plain definitions of the terms used across local commerce, marketplace economics and startup investing — from batch routing and density to take rate, CAC payback and bottom-up sizing.
Local commerce
- Local commerce operating system
- A single software layer that runs the everyday operations of local businesses — catalogue, orders, payments, customer records, delivery and discovery — instead of solving one of those in isolation.Deelo is a local commerce operating system spanning six business platforms on one shared core.
- Hyperlocal marketplace
- A marketplace whose supply and demand sit inside the same neighbourhood or city, so fulfilment happens within minutes to hours rather than days.Deelo runs hyperlocal marketplaces for shops, professionals, agencies, therapists and parcels simultaneously.
- Merchant SaaS
- Software sold to a merchant on subscription that runs their business operations — orders, inventory, pricing, customers and payouts.Merchant SaaS is Deelo's primary revenue line, charged monthly per business.
- Commerce infrastructure
- The shared rails commerce runs on — identity, payments, logistics, catalogue and messaging — supplied to many businesses rather than owned by one.Deelo's core supplies authentication, payments, wallet, maps, notifications, reviews, AI, analytics, accounts and delivery to every platform it runs.
- Last mile logistics
- The final leg of a delivery, from the local hub or shop to the customer's door. It is the most expensive and least automated part of the chain.Deelo Runner addresses last mile cost with intelligent batch routing across categories.
- Batch routing
- Assigning several pickups and drops to one courier as a single optimised route, instead of dispatching one courier per order.Batch routing is how Deelo Runner lowers cost per drop while keeping delivery times predictable.
- Dark store
- A warehouse that fulfils online orders but is closed to walk-in shoppers. Quick-commerce companies use them to compress delivery times, at the cost of holding inventory.Deelo holds no inventory and operates no dark stores — existing local shops are the fulfilment network.
Marketplace economics
- Take rate
- The share of transaction value a marketplace keeps as revenue. High take rates raise revenue per order but push merchants to transact off-platform.Deelo keeps merchant take rates deliberately low and earns primarily from subscription instead.
- Network effects
- A property where each additional participant makes the product more valuable to existing participants. In marketplaces this usually runs across the two sides — more supply attracts more demand, and back again.Deelo adds a cross-category effect: each new industry raises fleet utilisation and lowers cost for the categories already live.
- Density
- The concentration of supply and demand inside a small geography. Density is what makes hyperlocal delivery economics work; without it, courier idle time destroys margin.Deelo saturates one city before opening the next, precisely to buy density before scale.
- Contribution margin
- Revenue from a transaction minus the variable cost of serving it. It shows whether growth funds itself or burns cash.
Investor terms
- CAC payback
- The number of months of gross profit needed to recover the cost of acquiring a customer. Shorter payback means growth can be self-funded sooner.
- ARPU
- Average revenue per user, usually per month. In B2B SaaS it is measured per paying business account.
- TAM, SAM and SOM
- Total addressable market, serviceable addressable market and serviceable obtainable market — the nested view of how large an opportunity is, how much a company can realistically serve, and how much it can win near term.
- Beachhead market
- The narrow first market a company wins completely before expanding, chosen because winning it proves the model and funds the next step.Kottayam was Deelo's beachhead; Kochi was the proof the playbook repeats.
- Bottom-up market sizing
- Sizing a market from unit economics upward — businesses multiplied by realistic revenue per business — rather than taking a share of a large published figure.
Related reading
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