Our Commitment to Shoppers: Support While You Shop and Beyond

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 support while you shop and beyond.

Shoppers are deeply valued members of the Instacart community. We always strive to provide you with the support and safety that makes your shopping experience as seamless as possible and protects you while you work.

This includes timely access to helpful support when it’s needed most, app functionality that makes it easy for you to navigate the store, and innovative safety features to help protect you and the broader community. Whether you shop to make ends meet or to save for the future, we’re here to help you make it happen — and to support you every step of the way.

Faster, real-time support when you need it most

While we always want to make the shopping experience as seamless as possible, we know that there may also be times when shoppers need fast, real-time support. Starting today, we’re introducing live phone support, giving shoppers who are actively shopping or delivering the ability to speak with a Care representative directly through the Shopper app.

By introducing phone support, we’re making it even easier for shoppers to get the quick help you need, from a helpful Care agent who can address your problem in real time via phone. When things don’t go as planned, phone support can help shoppers quickly resolve your issue so you can get back to serving your customers with the care and commitment you’re known for. 

This feature will be rolling out for all shoppers over the coming weeks. For shoppers who are not actively shopping or delivering or have general questions about the Instacart platform, our Care agents continue to be available 24/7 via chat directly in the Shopper app.

App functionality that makes it easy for you to navigate the store 

We know that shoppers look to Instacart to efficiently earn income on your own time. To help enable that, we want to deliver a best-in-class app experience that helps you get the job done. This includes features that improve the shopping and delivery experience, making earning with Instacart even more seamless.

We’re piloting a new, innovative in-store navigation feature that will offer shoppers an interactive map of the grocery store, helping you know exactly where to find your customer’s items. Our new in-store navigation feature will show precise item locations and an even more intuitive shopping list, so you can find items as efficiently as possible. This feature is currently being piloted in more than 80 grocery store locations across North America, with more being added over time.

Innovative in-app safety features to help protect shoppers and the community

The care and safety of the shopper community is one of the biggest priorities we have as a company. Over the past few years, we’ve introduced several innovative safety features to help protect our community. Now, we’re making it even easier to access these features and get immediate assistance, through our new safety toolkit.

The safety toolkit will be available from the top right corner on every app screen, offering easy access to all of our safety features in one tap. Safety features including emergency calling, safety alert notifications, and incident reporting will all be readily accessible in the safety toolkit, so shoppers can get the timely assistance you need in the rare case you may face an emergency on the platform.

We’re also introducing new optional lessons on best practices for shopping and delivering with safety, adding to our Carrot Academy library on how to stay safe. As always, shopper safety is of the utmost importance to all of us at Instacart, and we’re committed to continually investing in these important updates as we seek to make shopping with Instacart the safest possible way to earn. 

Building on our shopper commitments

We look forward to sharing more about each of our shopper commitments in the coming months, as we deliver more exciting new app updates and features to improve the shopper experience. Keep an eye on our shopper microsite for the latest updates. 

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.