Our Commitment to Shoppers: A Community Built on Best Intent

We’re rolling out a suite of new product features each month to further our commitment to shoppers and share more about how we’re building an even better shopper experience. This month, we’re sharing more about a community built on best intent.

We believe best intent goes both ways. We act with consideration and compassion for the Instacart community and ask that shoppers and customers assume the best of us and each other. If things don’t go to plan, we’ll handle the situation with the utmost attention, care and concern to find the best possible outcome for everyone.

Reimagining the customer ratings system

We’ve heard consistent feedback from shoppers that the ratings system could be improved. Over the past year, we’ve been making incremental updates to make the ratings system more fair for shoppers across the platform.

Today, we’re introducing a reimagined ratings system that will be even more helpful, informative, and fair for shoppers. Instead of prioritization of batches being based on having the highest rating possible, shoppers will now just need to maintain a 4.7 or above for batch prioritization. While we always encourage shoppers to strive for great customer service, we also know that sometimes things happen, and a few low ratings shouldn’t have a large impact on your access to batches. This change will go into effect on June 10, 2022. 

We’ve also improved our ratings protection, removing even more ratings for reasons that may be outside of a shopper’s control. Moving forward, we’ll now remove a rating if it’s from a customer who consistently rates their shoppers below 5 stars. As always, we’ll continue to drop low ratings if we determine that the customer is fraudulent, or for other factors like low stock items or severe weather incidents. 

Giving shoppers more information and transparency

The changes to the ratings system do not impact how shoppers will access batches more broadly — your location and proximity to the store continue to be the most important factors to access batches. Because of this, we’re putting more information in-app to help you know when you’re close enough to a store location to be prioritized for available batches.

Once you’re within the designated proximity of a store, a message will appear on the Shopper app screen letting you know that you are ideally situated, and if you can expect to see batches from this location in the near future. If that store does not have many batches available, we may also show you other recommended store locations nearby that have higher batch availability, in case you would prefer to move to another nearby store location.

To offer even more information about your experience, we’re introducing a new “Your stats” screen, which will be live for all shoppers by June 1.

This screen will show your average customer rating, detailed customer feedback, stats like how many batches you’ve completed on the platform, and a new section on accuracy, where you can see details about items found, replacements, and more. Your accuracy information doesn’t have any impact on your rating or access to batches, but it can provide valuable insights into your shopping experience on the app.

Enabling two-way feedback and more for shoppers

As we continue to operate with mutual best intent, it’s important to us that we hear directly from shoppers on an ongoing basis about your experience and how it may be able to improve.

We’ve rolled out new batch-level feedback for shoppers to share your input about your experience after each batch you complete. You don’t have to complete it, but we take the input seriously and will use it to make the platform better over time. The feedback you leave won’t have any impact on your account or access to batches, so we hope you answer honestly.

As part of this feedback, you can share if you had an issue with a customer and don’t want to be paired with them moving forward. If you note that you had a rude customer, we’ll give you the option to block that customer from your list of batches moving forward, giving you more ways to customize your shopping experience.

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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.