Paying Customers for Patience:An approach for pricing slotted deliveries for Quick-Commerce

Abstract Quick-commerce platforms advertise sub-10-minute delivery, yet they increasingly offer slotted options where orders arrive with a delay within a time window, delivered via a shared route. Under current platform practices, customers lack financial incentives to choose slotted delivery despite the substantial operational savings it offers to the platform. This study models optimal pricing for such slotted deliveries and determines how platforms should incentivize patient customers during dark-store fulfillment. Our analytical framework incorporates exact solo delivery tour geometry, courier capacity constraints, stochastic batching, endogenous delay feedback, and two-part courier piece rates clearing reservation wages. Calibrated on opensource datasets from Amazon, Grubhub, Instacart, and Olist, the model yields four main insights. First, under uniform customer time values, the optimal slot discount is equal to the marginal cost savings multiplied by a pass-through rate ρ = 1/(2+ε), where ε is the elasticity of the delay of the slot to the batch size; the calibrated pass-through is 0.40 – - 0.55 (versus 1.0 under competitive fee setting), passing $0.50 – $ 0.90 per order to customers. Second, cost savings are saturated in a single courier capacity load (C), as the marginal tour time per stop drops from 5.8 to less than 2 minutes by the twelfth stop; the optimal discount remains flat for slot lengths of 15 minutes to 3 hours, making the shortest capacity-filling window optimal. Third, distance-based fee schedules increase slotting surplus by 28% by grading discounts with distance, but empirical fees remain strictly flat within metros (distance explains only 1.4% of fee variance in Olist). Fourth, grocery demand follows a broad daytime plateau (10:00–16:00) rather than a bimodal distribution, making same-hour slots viable across most operational hours (08:00–21:00). A day-long simulation confirms analytical delay predictions and reveals that instant fulfillment requires fleet utilization below 0.50–0.65.