How to Turn Every Grocery Delivery Into a Growth Opportunity On Instacart

Today’s retail market is facing massive disruption. Grocers who provided delivery services in response to the pandemic lockdowns now find that consumers continue to appreciate, and expect, the same ease, convenience, and speed of these services in a post-pandemic world.

Due to the rise of e-commerce across other industries, consumers don’t just want their groceries delivered — they want them delivered fast, with 85% of consumers expecting their groceries delivered in two hours or less.

Led by consumer behavior, expectations, and demand, grocery retail is changing, bringing with it new challenges. These challenges affect how retailers price products, market ads, fulfill labor requirements, provide rapid delivery, and enhance the customer experience through acceptable substitutions.

“The new normal” is now for grocers

Grocers shouldn’t expect a “return to normal.” Online grocery shopping is the new normal — and is only going to grow.

Over the past two years, grocery spend has shifted from offline to online at an accelerated pace. In 2019, only 3% of U.S. grocery shopping took place online, and in just two years online grocery tripled to nearly 10% in 2021. Online grocery penetration is expected to double to reach 20.5% by 2026 and could reach up to 35% in the next 5 years.

Retailers run the risk of playing catch up with consumer demands, and falling behind competitors, as they struggle to find solutions at scale that solve for both fulfillment and growth.

Connect with consumers to thrive, not just survive

Being competitive is a baseline requirement to thrive in this new environment. That’s why at Instacart, we’re not just helping our retail partners compete. We’re helping them unlock new opportunities to connect with consumers and grow.

To rapidly adapt to changing market dynamics and consumer expectations — now and in the near future — retailers have adopted Instacart’s full-suite of fulfillment solutions. 

Some of Instacart’s most innovative fulfillment solutions are delivered with Carrot Connect — a growing set of APIs that extend our technology to grocers’ white-label sites as part of the Instacart Platform — and retailer partners are seeing growth.

Retailers powering their fulfillment operations with Carrot Connect find that it accelerates their ability to deliver the experiences customers demand, while providing a branded, white-label solution that complements retailers’ existing brands and environments.

Driving growth for grocers and retailers

Carrot Connect has driven a 47% sales lift on Instacart over a fifteen-month period for one large grocery partner, with a $115 average basket size for this partner over the last 15 months.

Non-grocers who have adopted Carrot Connect have seen sales increases too. A non-grocer retailer that adopted Carrot Connect achieved 25% lift in sales on Instacart over the same fifteen-month period.

These results show Carrot Connect drives growth and core KPIs by improving service, performance, and efficiency. Also noteworthy, Carrot Connect’s white-label service keeps the retailer’s branding front and center in all customer-facing interactions, giving the customer a consistently excellent experience on the front end.

Carrot Connect accelerates the time to bring services online, with a set of API-based services, including fulfillment, loyalty program integration, replacements, search, personalization, and ads. These services are available as part of Instacart’s white-label storefront and as affordable, à la carte products that can be integrated into the retailer’s existing system.

Contact us to learn how Instacart’s suite of fulfillment solutions can help achieve your omnichannel growth objectives.

Instacart

Instacart is the leading grocery technology company in North America, partnering with more than 1,400 national, regional, and local retail banners to deliver from more than 80,000 stores across more than 14,000 cities in North America. To read more Instacart posts, you can browse the company blog or search by keyword using the search bar at the top of the page.