What is Order batching?
Grouping nearby or similar orders so they are planned, assigned and delivered together, raising stops per hour without raising cost.
Batching is the practice of treating several orders as one unit of work: same area, same window, same driver, one trip. It is the cheapest way to raise density, and density is what determines cost per delivery.
The trade-off is time. A batch that waits for a fourth order is a batch that delivers the first one later, so batching is always a negotiation between efficiency and speed. Operations with wide delivery windows can batch aggressively. On-demand operations promising thirty minutes can barely batch at all.
The practical version for most local fleets is geographic and temporal at once: group by zone, then by window, then let sequencing take the distance out of what remains.
In PrivateMile: orders can be grouped by zone and window on the board, assigned to a driver or team as a group, and re-sequenced together — with bulk actions so a batch stays a batch rather than becoming forty individual edits.