Instacart gig workers have a smartphone app with scan tools at their disposal to complete delivery orders – but what if regular shoppers could use it too? The grocery delivery service plans to get regular, everyday shoppers to ‘Connected Stores’, where they would use a moving smart cart with built-in support for lists, order meats or pastries, search for items and pay themselves.
The star of the show is Instacart’s upgraded “Caper Cart,” a smart cart that can detect what items have been placed in your list — based on computer vision and weight — and tick them off in your app. It has a large touchscreen that syncs your shopping list from your app and a connected payment terminal so you can checkout yourself without waiting to use a terminal. The previous versions are: in operation at select Kroger storesbut those were created before Instacart took over Caper AI a year ago.
The new car is slimmer, lighter and can hold 65 percent more products, according to Instacart. The company claims it is the only smart cart that can recharge its batteries by stacking carts instead of changing batteries. They also accept over-the-air software updates. But if you can’t get one of these carts, you can also use Scan & Pay in the app to check yourself out.
At first glance, this goes against the goal of Instacart’s delivery service: to remove the inconvenience of having to go to the supermarket yourself. But as the pandemic eases, Demand for online delivery services is declining and hurting the bottom line of companies like Instacart, Uber and DoorDash.
Smaller grocers don’t have the resources to match the Amazon and Walmarts of the world
But people love their ability to make lists, go to the store, and have stuff ready, while also having the flexibility to ring an audible ring and grab a few extra, unplanned items. Major supermarket chains are spending the money it takes to add connected shopping and app self-checkout, while Amazon’s checkout-less technology is becoming more widely available — something smaller grocers don’t have the resources to match.
That’s what Instacart has been working on: building a white label smart shopping ecosystem that it claims can give any store a digital window display or bring an existing one to work with the Instacart app. “Today they have traditional curbside and same-day delivery services,” e-commerce expert Kassi Socha begins to tell us what motivates Instacart. “If I’m at the grocery store and see the Instacart logo that helps me checkout seamlessly, similar to the Amazon Go experience, I could try it and adopt that new behavior because somehow I know, shape or shape Instacart is going to save me time.”
It’s a sentiment in line with U.S. consumers’ shopping plans for this holiday: 38 percent of them plan to use a combination of online orders for in-store pickup, use mobile payments, use online listings, and more. roadside pickup, all in addition to lighter but strong demand for same-day deliveries, according to Gartner Consumer Insights.
Socha tells The edge that retailers large and small are looking for a turnkey software suite that Instacart needs to get their services up and running quickly to “compete at the same speed with Amazon and Walmarts of the world”. According to Socha, Instacart currently works with more than 900 retailers in 75,000 stores across North America.
Instacart’s software suite is the core component of its Connected Stores, taking what it has learned from partnering with supermarkets such as Publix and Wegmans and extending it to make smart any grocery store. It requires all fulfillment, insights and even advertising tools to create a vertical solution that integrates the digital storefront with Instacart – something that is said to save the store money compared to a full overhaul. Store operations also get better inventory insights and save time ordering things that are expected to be out of stock.
For shoppers, the system isn’t as fast as just picking something up and walking away, like the systems that work in certain Whole Foods and Amazon Go stores. However, you can do things like order cold cuts, pastries and fresh food within the same interface. And at the grocery store end, an updated Instacart FoodStorm ordering system combines kiosk/ticket orders and online orders in the same place.
And if you can’t find something, the company has special e-ink price tags that can blink a light, drawing your eye to the right spot in an aisle. They are called Carrot Tags and often they display a QR code so you can scan it and see even more information about the product. The tag can also immediately display other useful information, such as whether the product is gluten-free, kosher, organic, etc. It can even tell you whether an article qualifies for EBT or SNAP.
Bristol Farms in Irvine, California, will be the first of the Connected Stores to be fully equipped with all of Instacart’s new technology. You can also visit a Wakefern Food Corp. store to try out the Caper Carts. It will all go live “in the coming months”. Instacart’s partnership with Walmart for same-day grocery delivery was an attempt to challenge Amazon, and this is coming to the ecommerce/retail giant from a different angle. But Amazon may fight back if it builds tools like palm-reading biometric payment systems that will be available to non-Amazon companies.
Correction Monday, September 19, 2022 10:27 AM ET: An earlier version of the story said a partnership between Walmart and Instacart has ended. In reality, the partnership is still active. We regret the mistake.
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