From French Oak to Micro Brews: The Buzz on Alcohol E-Commerce

Welcome to the first edition of Instacart Analytics — our new blog series diving into the data of demand. Instacart is home to a crack team of data scientists who predict trends, map use and extrapolate analysis to make the Instacart experience great for customers, shoppers and our partners. Look for more Instacart Analytics blog posts in the coming months.

Americans love a cold beverage, and in cities where Instacart sells alcohol, growth has spiked — even compared to the fast growth we’ve seen in food-only markets. The data may surprise you — let’s take a look:

The numbers support the claims:

• 9% of Instacart customers have Alcohol delivered to their homes.
• 40% are buying more online compared to last year.
• 20% plan to increase the amount they buy online in the next three months.

Within the group of Instacart customers who purchase alcohol, over 60% prefer online delivery to visiting a store. Check out the breakdown below:

We also found the majority of Instacart customers order alcohol on Thursdays and Fridays, with the largest spike late Friday afternoon. Sounds like savvy weekend planning to avoid visiting the store during peak rush hour.

Speaking of those refreshments, the top three ordered through Instacart are:

1. Tito’s Handmade Vodka
2. La Crema Winery
3. Corona Extra and Corona Light

With Instacart planning expansion to an additional 100 cities in 2017 alone, soon there will be even more beverage options to choose from, and that’s why we have partnered with several large retailers and continue to grow those relationships.

The National Retail Federation estimates that e-commerce sales will grow up to 3x more than overall retail in 2017 alone and based on our findings, alcohol will be a big part of that. There’s never been a more critical time to have an e-commerce solution and get in the game. Instacart is here to help.

For more information on how Instacart can help you with your e-commerce strategy or questions about Instacart Analytics please email us at cpg@instacart.com.

A word about privacy

We have taken great care to protect the privacy of our users and retail partners and to ensure that the data is entirely anonymous.

• This data is aggregated across a large subset of our retail partners across the US.
• All of the IDs in the dataset are entirely randomized, and cannot be linked back to any other ID
• Only products that are bought by multiple people at multiple retailers are included, and no retailer ID is provided