Introducing Shop Talk, the New Online Community, and More Resources for Shoppers

In 2020, we want to be clear in our commitment: to build the best experience possible for shoppers, with shoppers. This includes rolling out new features and programs to ensure the shopper’s voice continues to be part of everything we do and finding more opportunities to recognize your efforts to create a great customer experience.

Today, we’re introducing several new features, products and resources for the shopper community, helping you better connect with each other and Instacart.

Listen & Learn

Our goal is to constantly listen to and learn from the shopper community, taking your feedback and using it to develop a better shopper experience. To that end, we’ve built more resources to help us understand your experience and give you the tools you need to thrive.

Shop Talk, the new virtual shopper community, is as a place for shoppers to share your experiences with each other and Instacart, offering feedback and discussion about every aspect of shopping. Shoppers can use Shop Talk to discuss best practices, get information about starting out with Instacart, ask other shoppers for their opinion on unique situations, or connect directly with Instacart. In the past several months of piloting Shop Talk, shoppers have spent an average of nearly one hour a month in the community, and averaged more than five page views per visit. Now, we’re bringing Shop Talk to everyone, expanding its availability to all shoppers in the coming months.

At Instacart, we have a range of shoppers — those who have been shopping for many years, and many others who are joining the platform every day. No matter how long you’ve been shopping, we’ve heard feedback that shoppers could use more guidance on how to excel as a shopper. We developed Carrot Academy for just this purpose, to offer best practices for both new shoppers and those more established. Now we’re introducing three new optional Carrot Academy lessons, joining existing lessons on topics such as picking high-quality items, making great replacements, and communicating with customers, to add to the robust Carrot Academy library.

Innovate

By listening to and learning from shoppers, we can gain valuable insights that help us make the overall shopper experience even better. We’re looking to not just listen to shoppers, but take those learnings and turn them into innovations that will make shopping with Instacart even better.

Shopper Ideas will take shoppers’ suggested new features for the Shopper app and bring them directly to our engineering and operations teams. From within Shop Talk, you can submit your product ideas and upvote those from other shoppers. All of the ideas that receive enough upvotes will be considered by the product and engineering teams to determine whether or not they can be implemented into the product. As we build more product features, we want to ensure we’re incorporating shopper feedback at every stage of the process; by gathering ideas in this way, we can make sure the product we build speaks directly to shopper needs.

In addition to learning helpful best practices from other shoppers and through optional lessons, shoppers can also get to know customers’ preferences through the updated How Am I Doing? page. The newly-refreshed page shows customer comments, giving shoppers valuable feedback on shopping and delivering.

Celebrate

The shopper community is full of diverse individuals, all of whom have a unique story and reason for shopping with Instacart. We want to continue celebrating this community and sharing what makes it special to be an Instacart shopper.

Bravocado is a new series in Shop Talk that highlights amazing stories within the shopper community. Shoppers can share why you started shopping with Instacart, what makes it the right opportunity for you, and what it means to you to be a shopper. If you want to be considered for the Bravocado series, you can reach out to nominate yourself or a friend.

And, as shoppers are inherently unique, we worked with shoppers to understand what makes it special to shop with Instacart. Based on shopper feedback, we highlighted these unique reasons, which can be found on our newly redesigned shopper page, along with a video highlighting some members of the shopper community.

As we continue through 2020, we’ll be introducing even more resources to help further our commitment to listening, learning, improving and celebrating the shopper community. We are immensely grateful for the shoppers who choose Instacart every day, and we look forward to continuing our commitment to shoppers throughout not just this year, but many years ahead.

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.