Open Delivery
Protocol

The common language for ordering, fulfillment, and delivery.

Open Delivery defines building blocks for food and retail delivery coordination—from merchant catalog discovery to order placement and last-mile logistics—allowing the ecosystem to interoperate through one standard, without custom bilateral integrations.

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Learn

Protocol overview, core concepts, and design principles

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Implement

GitHub repo, technical spec, and capability reference

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Contribute

Feedback, issues, and pull requests welcome

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Core capabilities

The protocol is organized into independent capabilities. Each capability specifies information model, supported operations, interaction roles, and interoperability obligations.

Before any capability is used, participants discover each other through the mandatory well-known document defined by the protocol.

Merchant

Merchant entity structure and operational rules. Menus, categories, items, availability.


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Orders

Order lifecycle, state management, and coordination. Idempotency, events, cancellation.


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Customer

Customer, lead, and customer-linked order interoperability for CRM, loyalty, and marketing use cases.


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Logistics

Delivery coordination and tracking. Address resolution, delivery states, and updates.


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Built for flexibility, neutrality, and scale

Delivery coordination demands interoperability. Open Delivery is built on transport-agnostic protocol semantics—REST, MCP, or any other binding—so different systems work together without custom integration per pair.

Transport-agnostic

Protocol semantics define conformance. Transport binding (REST, MCP, queues) is a separate layer. The same protocol works over any data interchange mechanism.

Merchants at the center

Built to facilitate commerce while ensuring merchants retain control of their catalog, pricing, and operational rules. Merchant context is the single source of truth.

Normative and unambiguous

Uses RFC 2119 keywords (MUST, MUST NOT, SHOULD, MAY) throughout. No implicit behavior—if it is not normatively stated, it is not required.

Autonomous peers

Ordering Application, Software Service, and Logistics Service are independent peers. There is no central orchestrator—each party decides autonomously.

Secure and merchant-scoped

Credentials are merchant-scoped. Implementations MUST NOT share a single credential set across merchants. Security contracts are first-class protocol citizens.


Get started today

Open Delivery is an open standard designed to let ordering apps, merchant software, and logistics providers interact seamlessly—without needing custom, one-off integrations for every connection. We actively seek your feedback and contributions.

Read the concepts

Understand parties, capabilities, and coordination model

Follow the rules

Cross-cutting normative rules and RFC 2119 language

Set up access

Understand the shared authentication flow before protected capability operations