Selling alcohol

If your business is licensed to sell alcohol, you can sell it on your own ordering page and send it out with your own drivers. Delitero gives you the age gate at checkout and the ID check at the door, and it keeps the record. The licence, and everything the licence makes you responsible for, stays yours.

Switching it on

Two things have to be true before an alcohol item can be published. Your state has to be one where Delitero supports alcohol, and you have to attest that you hold the licence. Publish an alcohol item without both and the platform refuses with a reason, rather than quietly listing it. Some states do not permit a business to deliver alcohol with its own employees at all; Delaware is one, and there the answer is pickup.

Alcohol is outside the 5%

Delitero's fee is calculated on the order excluding alcohol lines, excluding tax on them, and excluding any container deposit on them. A percentage of an alcohol sale is the single most common reason a regulator treats a software vendor as part of the sale, and we would rather not be paid than be that. It also means adding a wine list does not raise what you pay us.

At checkout

An order containing alcohol asks the customer to confirm their age before it can be paid for. That is the first gate, and it is the one the customer sees.

At the door

The driver cannot mark an alcohol delivery as delivered until the ID check is done. The app asks for the type of document (driver's licence, state ID, passport, or US military ID) and the date of birth printed on it, and the driver confirms three things: that the ID has not expired, that the person on it is the person in front of them, and that the person is not intoxicated.

Only the year of birth is ever transmitted or stored. The app checks the full date against today so the 21+ test is exact, then keeps the year alone. No photograph of an ID is captured anywhere in the product, and there is no field to put one in. Where a state requires a signature at handoff, the app says so.

The five refusals

A driver who cannot hand the alcohol over records why, from a fixed list rather than a text box: the person is underage, there is no ID, the ID does not match, the person is intoxicated, or nobody of age is present. Recording a refusal is not an error state. The order completes as delivered without the alcohol, the alcohol lines are refunded automatically, and the driver is given the return leg with a list of what to bring back. The refusal is what the record shows, which is what protects the licence.

What the record keeps

Each verified handoff and each refusal is written to the order's event log with the driver who did it and the moment it happened, and kept for three years. That is the evidence a regulator asks for after the fact.

What is yours, not ours

Delitero holds no alcohol licence and is not a seller, shipper, or deliverer of alcohol. You are the licensee. Verifying age where the law requires it, refusing a sale where the law requires refusal, keeping the records your state demands, and complying with every condition of your licence remain yours, and using these screens does not move any of that to us. The terms say this in section 7, as an allocation of responsibility rather than an indemnity, because several states will not enforce an indemnity against a licensee's liquor liability and we would rather write something that holds.

Where alcohol is available is part of where Delitero works. If your state is not on that list for alcohol yet, the ordering page will not let you publish an alcohol item, and no amount of configuring will change that.