Connect threads and lanes

A thread is the conversation home of one order. It carries the participants, the lanes they talk in, the order’s status, and your custom_data — and it moves through its life without your backend babysitting it.

​

Roles

Every participant joins with a role: customer, merchant, or courier. Roles are what Connect reasons about — visibility, Supervisor behavior, and analytics are all per-role, so you never hand-manage who belongs in which channel. Participants are identified by your IDs (external_id). Connect never exposes phone numbers or emails between participants — the thread is the contact channel, so a customer can reach the courier without either seeing the other’s number.

​

Lanes

A lane is a pairwise conversation inside the thread. Each participant sees only their own lanes; the Supervisor sees all of them. Why lanes instead of one open room? Because a merchant’s “we’re out of the grilled chicken, substitute?” belongs with the customer, while a courier’s “parking is a nightmare, use the back entrance” belongs with the merchant — and neither should read the other’s traffic. Lanes give you a three-touchpoint conversation with 1:1 privacy. A lane is waiting until both of its roles are present (the customer↔courier lane before courier assignment), active while the thread is open, and closed when the thread locks.

​

Lifecycle — the order drives it

You report order status with a single PATCH; Connect translates it into conversation behavior. Locked threads stay readable to participants and your team but accept no new messages — participants who need more help get one tap into your regular support flow via the Supervisor. Archived threads leave the apps entirely and remain queryable by API until retention deletes them. Grace and retention windows are configurable per org in Connect → Lifecycle, and per thread at creation.

​

Reassignment

Couriers change; threads shouldn’t. Remove the old courier and add the new one:

• The removed courier loses access immediately — including history.
• The new courier joins the same lane with fresh context; the Supervisor briefs them with a one-line summary (“Customer asked to leave the order at the gate, code 4411”).
• The customer keeps one continuous conversation instead of starting over.

​

What the thread carries

• reference — your order ID. Unique per org, idempotency key for creation, and the join key for everything analytics.
• custom_data — arbitrary JSON (vertical, basket value, promo flags). Surfaced to the Supervisor as answering context and returned on every read.
• Messages — text and attachments, each stamped with lane, sender participant, and per-language translations.
• Events — join/leave, status changes, Supervisor interventions: the full audit trail of the order conversation, exportable via API and streamed via webhooks.

​

Privacy defaults

• No participant ever sees another’s contact details — identity is display name + role, full stop.
• The Supervisor masks phone numbers, emails, and payment details typed into any lane (see AI Supervisor); attempts to move the conversation off-platform are flagged to you by webhook.
• Locked-thread history is retained for disputes exactly as long as your retention window — then it’s gone everywhere.