Instacart: A review
I started my graduate studies at the University of Illinois-Urbana Champaign and found that the supermarkets are 15–20 minutes drive from the university campus, where most students live. Most of the students at my campus don’t own a car, so the only option is to use the city bus service to visit these supermarkets, but city bus service is not frequent enough and it always takes more than 40–45 minutes one way to reach supermarkets including the waiting time for the bus. As a graduate student, I am always occupied with submissions, labs, side-projects, classes, group meetings, etc. and to find time for grocery shopping is hard, also eating outside is an easy excuse, but is unhealthy and not good for a student’s pocket.
And then there are times when you have shopped groceries and reached home only to realize that you forgot to buy some items, and this realization makes it more dreadful than spending so much time commuting and skimming different aisles.
Dreading the experience of grocery shopping made me look for solutions to my problem and I found Instacart.
Instacart is a same-day grocery delivery application with a presence in more than 90 markets in the US and in a few markets in Canada. Instacart has partnered with companies like Costco, Aldi’s, Whole Foods, etc. to deliver groceries to its customers.
How Instacart works?
Business Model
After using and learning more about Instacart, below are a few things that have made me appreciate the product, service and the company more:
- Simple UI and major features: The user interface is quite clean still very beautiful. The interface of the app takes into account the consumer behavior of navigating the aisles and presents the catalogue in the same way as a shopper would shop in a grocery store or supermarket. I have a habit of creating a shopping list before I go out grocery shopping, the app encapsulates this behavior really well by giving me the feature of building my shopping list inside the application and adding things to cart from the list itself. So, as soon as I run out of important items, I can make a list on the app and order when I have accumulated all the required items.
2. A catalogue of different stores: Before I started using Instacart, I first had to visit one end of the city to buy groceries and sometimes the other end to buy liquor, but Instacart now allows me to shop different stores at the ease of my home itself, I can select items from multiple stores and place a delivery.
3. Crowdsourced Recipes: A grocery app without recipes would be like an iPhone without iTunes. Instacart has given its users a platform to share their favorite recipes with all the users of the app. Also, now when my friends want me to host them for dinner or breakfast, I don’t have to think much, as I get all the recipes with directions to cook on the Instacart app itself, I just have to add recipes to cart and I get all the items that would take to make that particular dish.
4. Watch your deliveries: The app keeps the user updated on the real-time status of the friendly shopper and allows users to communicate with the shopper and vice-versa in case of any changes to be made in the shopping list.
5. Customer Centricity: The below image speaks volume about how much Instacart cares about its customers.
Sounds awesome, Right? But, there is always room for improvement.
- Transparency with customers: Many customers of the app have complained about the pricing policy and hidden markups of the Instacart. Instacart never explicitly mentions about the markup it adds on products and when users find out that Instacart has a hidden markup of 10–15% on many products, users tend to form a negative sentiment towards the application.
- Reorders and reminder notification: Instacart recently open-sourced their data, and my basic exploratory data analysis revealed a few insights that can be used to enhance user experience.
a. 59% of orders on the application are re-orders: Since 59% of orders are re-orders, Instacart knows what products to fill-in the cart when a user log-ins to the app, and this intelligence will save users a little more time of browsing through the vast catalogue.
b. Customer ordering habits: The data revealed that there are clusters of users who order once a week, once in two weeks and a few users who do once in every three weeks. Instacart can learn these behaviors and remind or notify its customers to order as per their ordering habits. This will make sure that Instacart’s customers’s fridge is never empty.
3. Snap a picture: There are times when the catalogue in the app doesn’t have a specific product, however, stores do have that product. The app should have an option for users to snap a picture or upload a picture from the web and share it with the shopper, who can further browse the product in the store and buy it for the user.
This was my review of Instacart. If you are short on time or care about your time, give it a try. Meanwhile, let me answer the Instacart shopper at my door.
