The short version: Almost every platform advertising "local delivery" is doing one job: deciding who is allowed to order. That is a zone or a radius. Very few do the second job, which is telling you what order to drive in. Square, Shopify, Squarespace, Wix, and Big Cartel all handle zones and none of them sequence your stops. Routing generally appears only in farm and hub software: CSAware lists route planning with printed labels, Local Food Marketplace builds distribution days around it, and Barn2Door puts routing on its higher tier. And under about twelve stops, a free mapping tool does the job well enough that paying for routing is over-buying.
All figures came from each company's own pages in July 2026.
They get sold under one phrase and they are genuinely different amounts of work.
Job one is a validation rule. Job three is an optimisation problem. A platform can be excellent at the first and have nothing at all for the third, and its marketing page will describe both as "local delivery."
So when you evaluate anything, ask precisely: does it produce a sequenced list of stops, or a list of orders I then sort myself?
Based on what each company publishes:
CSAware lists delivery scheduling with route planning and printed labels among its features. Its pricing is not published, so you will need a demo to learn what it costs.
Local Food Marketplace builds its whole model around named distribution days with packing and routing, which is why its tiers meter distribution days rather than anything else. Farm plans start at $129 a month billed annually and hub plans at $149.
Barn2Door places routing on its Business tier rather than its entry plan, alongside its Simple Tax Tool.
Homegrown states local delivery with a radius and a route.
Beyond those, most storefronts stop at zones. That is not a criticism; it is a different product category. A general e-commerce platform has no reason to know that you personally are driving the van.
The general-purpose ones, and they are perfectly good at it.
That GrazeCart cap is worth pausing on, because it shows how quickly zones alone become a constraint. Three zones covers a Tuesday run, a Thursday run, and a pickup point. Add a second market and you are over, and the unlimited-zones tier has no published price.
None of these tell you what order to drive in. You export the orders and sort them yourself, which for most vendors is genuinely fine.
What is worth checking on any of them is whether the export is usable. A list of orders with the delivery address in a single unstructured field is harder to work with than one that separates street, town, and postal code, because the second can be pasted straight into a mapping tool and the first cannot. That is a two-minute test in any trial and it decides whether hand-sorting takes five minutes or twenty-five.
Our comparison of in-house delivery against third-party apps covers the wider question of whether you should be driving at all, which is worth settling before optimising how you drive.
Later than the software suggests, and the threshold is worth knowing before you pay for it.
Under about 12 stops, free tools handle it. Google Maps supports multiple stops on a single route, and for a dozen addresses in a familiar area you will usually beat an algorithm anyway, because you know which street is one-way and which car park is impossible on a Saturday.
Between about 12 and 25 stops, sequencing starts costing real time. Twenty stops sorted by hand takes fifteen or twenty minutes and you will get it slightly wrong. A dedicated route app, separate from your storefront, solves this for a few dollars a month.
Above 25 stops, or with time windows, this becomes a genuine optimisation problem and integrated routing earns its keep. That is the point where farm and hub software starts making sense.
So the honest test is: count your stops on your busiest delivery day. If it is fewer than a dozen, do not choose a platform for routing. You are buying a solution to a problem you can currently solve with a free map and local knowledge.
Our guide to running local food delivery as a one-person operation covers the practical side, and our delivery day SOP template covers the process that matters more than the tooling.
Three things, all of which more platforms get wrong than routing.
Delivery zones tied to days. Your Tuesday area and your Thursday area are usually different, and a platform that only supports one radius forces you to run two stores or explain it in the order notes. Our guide to delivery zones and schedules covers how to structure that.
Minimum order values per zone. Driving eleven miles for a $12 order loses money. A minimum that varies by distance is the single most profitable delivery setting available, and plenty of platforms only support one global minimum. Our piece on minimum order values for food delivery covers where to set it.
Delivery fees that reflect distance. A flat fee across a fifteen-mile radius subsidises your furthest customers with your nearest ones. Our guide to delivery fee pricing works through the arithmetic.
Get those three right and a hand-sorted route costs you fifteen minutes. Get them wrong and no amount of routing optimisation fixes the fact that you are driving to unprofitable orders.
Take a vendor doing 20 deliveries a week across a 12-mile radius.
Without distance-based minimums, suppose five of those are $15 orders eleven miles out. At roughly 22 miles round trip each, and using the kind of per-mile figure most people underestimate, those five orders are consuming most of an hour and a meaningful share of your fuel to generate $75 of revenue. On a 30% margin that is $22.50 of gross profit for an hour of driving.
With a $40 minimum beyond eight miles, those customers either order more or collect instead. Either outcome is better, and you have gained an hour a week without buying any software.
Routing optimisation on 20 stops might save you 15% of driving time, which is perhaps 10 minutes. Useful, and about a tenth of what the minimum-order change was worth.
That is the real ranking. Pricing and minimums are worth far more than sequencing at the scale most local food vendors operate at, and they are settings rather than features, so they cost nothing.
Worth naming, because it is the part of delivery that no platform helps with and it carries real consequences.
Anything requiring refrigeration has to stay cold from your kitchen to the customer's hands, and a two-hour route in July is genuinely challenging in a car boot. The FDA's sanitary transportation rule sets out the federal framework for transporting food, and while the smallest operations are often outside its direct scope, the practices it describes are the sensible baseline regardless.
Practically, this often argues for a shorter route rather than a better-sequenced one. A tight radius with two runs beats a sprawling optimised loop when the product is perishable. Our guide to packaging food for local delivery covers what actually holds temperature, and our cottage food delivery playbook covers the rules that vary by state.
Usually not at the scale most local food vendors operate, but it is worth knowing where the thresholds sit rather than assuming.
For a single person delivering in a car within one state, the constraints that actually apply are generally your state and local food rules, not commercial vehicle regulation. Weight-based federal requirements are aimed at vehicles far larger than a hatchback with twenty boxes in the back.
What does change as you grow:
Point one catches more people than all the others combined, and it costs a phone call to settle. The SBA's guidance on paying business taxes is a reasonable general reference for the obligations that arrive alongside any of these, though your state remains the binding authority.
None of this is a platform decision. It is worth listing because vendors researching delivery software often assume the software is the hard part, and it very rarely is. Configuring one real delivery week in a trial usually surfaces the actual constraints, which tend to be your radius, your minimum, and your car, in that order.
Point six matters because the platforms with real routing are farm and hub software costing $1,500 a year and up, and they come with producer management, distribution days, and other machinery a single vendor does not need. Buying that to solve a sequencing problem is expensive. A dedicated route app alongside a $120-a-year storefront usually costs less and works better.
If what you need is delivery configured properly rather than optimised, Homegrown is $10 a month billed annually with 0% commission and 2.9% plus $0.30 processing published up front, and it handles pickup at each place you sell with its own schedule and cutoff, local delivery with a radius and a route, and sales tax calculated, filed, and remitted in all 50 states. The honest bounds: it is a single-vendor storefront. It does not aggregate producers, run distribution-day packing across multiple farms, print carrier labels, or ship nationally. If you are a hub coordinating twenty growers across three routes, Local Food Marketplace or CSAware are built for that and this is not. You can set up your real delivery zones in a trial and see whether the day-by-day structure matches how you actually drive.
Every platform below shows the same four commercial facts, because a table that lists one platform's transaction fee and not another's is not a comparison. "Not published" means exactly that: the company does not state it publicly.
| Platform | Local delivery and routing | Subscription (annual) | Free trial | Platform fee | Card processing |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Homegrown | Radius plus a route, no national shipping | $10/mo billed annually | 7-day free trial | $0 platform fee (0% commission) | 2.9% + $0.30 processing |
| Local Line | Delivery zones and route tools, farm-scale | $79/mo Core ($950/yr) | 7-day free trial, no card required | $0 platform fee | 2.9% + $0.30 processing |
| Barn2Door | Route planning included, priced for larger farms | $119/mo + $399 one-time setup | No free trial, demo only | $0 commission | 2.9% + $0.30 processing |
| GrazeCart | Starter limits you to 3 delivery zones | $89/mo Starter, rest unpublished | No trial published | Platform fee not published | Processing not published |
| Farmigo | Delivery-centric, priced on delivery revenue | No subscription | No trial published | 2% commission on delivery revenue, $150/mo min | Processing not published |
| Shopify | Local delivery exists, routing needs an app | $29/mo Basic | 3-day trial, then $1/mo for 3 | 2% platform fee if not on Shopify Payments | from 2.9% + $0.30 processing |
Mostly farm and hub software. CSAware lists route planning with printed labels, Local Food Marketplace builds distribution days around routing, Barn2Door puts routing on its Business tier, and Homegrown states delivery with a radius and a route.
No. Both handle delivery zones, which decide who can order and what they pay. Sequencing your stops is not part of either product, though Shopify has apps that add it.
Roughly 25, or fewer if you have time windows. Under about 12 stops a free mapping tool is fine, and between 12 and 25 a standalone route app costs a few dollars a month and works well.
Delivery zones that vary by day, minimum order values that vary by distance, and fees that scale with distance. Those three are settings rather than features, cost nothing, and are worth more money than sequencing.
Usually. A single fee across a wide radius means your nearest customers subsidise your furthest ones, and your furthest orders may be losing money outright once you count the driving time.
Generally not at small scale, though rules vary by state and by product. Refrigerated items are the constraint that bites first, and the practical answer is usually a shorter route rather than more equipment.
Rarely. Platforms with real routing start around $1,500 a year and include producer management you probably do not need. A dedicated route app alongside a $120-a-year storefront usually costs less and does the job.
"Local delivery" on a pricing page almost always means zones, not routes. Zones decide who can order. Routes decide what order you drive in. Only a handful of platforms do the second, and they are farm and hub systems priced accordingly.
Before treating routing as a buying criterion, count your stops. Under a dozen, a free map and your own local knowledge beat an algorithm, and you should be choosing a platform on other grounds entirely.
Spend the attention instead on the three settings that actually move money: zones that vary by day, minimums that vary by distance, and fees that scale with it. Those are worth an hour a week and real margin, and no amount of route optimisation compensates for driving eleven miles to deliver a $15 order.
