Instacart went public three weeks back and it felt like a personal victory of sorts. As if I played a role in making that happen (my back-of-napkin math suggests that with 36 orders and $2k spent along the way, I can take credit for 0.0001% of their revenue at the time).
There have been only two companies/products that have had a significant impact on my life and have fundamentally changed the way I do things. Uber and Instacart. Uber taught me that I don’t need a car to travel and Instacart taught me that I don’t need to visit a grocery store to get groceries.
I have talked about my Uber experiences before. The Instacart story is however one I have been wanting to write about for ages.
I moved to Las Vegas in the summer of 2017 without a car of my own. It was at the height of the Uber-ification (is that even a word?) that happened. Car ownership in the US had started to see a decline as more and more people gravitated towards Uber (and Lyft – props to them as well!). People preferred the convenience of not having to worry about car maintenance, parking, insurance etc. After all, the point was to get from point A to point B. I was in complete agreement.
But one of the few downsides of not owning a car was grocery shopping. But like how Uber solved one problem, I knew there would be something out there that would solve the grocery problem.
Enter Amazon Prime Now and its 2-hour grocery delivery promise.
Amazon had launched its service in Vegas long back I made my way to sin city and had kind of created a stronghold in this segment. Amazon did solve my problem. I was able to order all that I wanted on the app and it was at my doorstep in a couple of hours.
Amazon wasn’t bad, but I didn’t know what good was supposed to look like.
My biggest problem with Amazon was that it sold things in bulk. I didn’t want the 3lbs bag of onions, I just wanted the 3 onions. I knew I had to find an alternative.
It was around that same time when listening to podcasts had become my new favourite hobby and that’s when I stumbled upon the Instacart episode on How I Built This (in my opinion one of the best podcasts ever created). I had found my answer.
There were 4 key reasons that made me switch allegiance to Instacart.
- Small Orders
- Freshness
- Replacements
- Personal Touch
Small Orders
The Amazon Problem – Like I mentioned above, Amazon used to sell everything in big bags that I didn’t know what to do with. I just needed something for 1 person – me!
The Instacart Solution – Instacart gave me exactly what I wanted – nothing more, nothing less. Only want 2 bananas? Not a problem.
Switched from Prime Now to Instacart back in 2018 because Instacart solved a very basic problem of mine – the ability to buy just the 2 onions I needed instead of the 3lbs bags Amazon used to sell. Solve user problems -> acquire customers -> grow! https://t.co/ftNpFY9LVE
— Rohan Khadilkar (@rohan_khadilkar) October 9, 2020
Freshness
The Amazon Problem – Amazon had a warehouse that housed everything you ordered. Putting things in a warehouse is okay for things like cereal, water bottles, and packed products in general. Veggies, fruits, and dairy on the other hand was a different story. I used to get things that were either not ripe and ready for consumption (bananas were always green) or not fresh of the shelf (closer to the sell by date).
The Instacart Solution – Instacart didn’t have a warehouse, they had a shopper. A shopper that would physically go to the grocery store you have ordered from at the time of your choosing and shop for you. That guaranteed freshness, something an Amazon warehouse couldn’t compete with.
Replacements
The Amazon Problem – What you see on the app when you order vs. actual inventory may not always be in sync. This results in situations where the product you ordered won’t eventually find its way to you. My grocery list was always divided into two buckets – things I need (milk, toothpaste etc.) and things I want (like the chocolate walnut cake that I occasionally indulged in). I was fine if the out-of-stock item was from my wants category, but it was super frustrating if it turned out to be from my needs category.
The Instacart Solution – Instacart had the advantage of having an actual person at the grocery store, one who could find appropriate replacements if the item ordered wasn’t available. I could list replacement items while ordering or the shopper could suggest replacements while they were shopping. They had found a way to convert a potentially huge friction point into an extremely amazing customer experience.
Personal Touch
The Amazon Problem – Prime Now shopping felt exactly like buying from the main Amazon app, where their goal was to just get things from seller to consumer as quickly as possible. Problem is buying groceries is not the same as buying shoes online. Grocery shopping involves many small decisions that are made on the fly. Small salad packet not available? That’s fine, I can make do with the large one. Tomatoes not fresh? Maybe I shouldn’t get them. Prime Now didn’t allow for that quick decision making to happen.
The Instacart Solution – Instacart found a way. The shopper at the grocery store was able to make these decisions for me. And I loved that!
I’ll end with a few disclaimers –
My experiences are not recent. These are my thoughts from back in 2018, which just never made it to my blog. It’s been five years and as we all know, things in tech change in a matter of weeks. So a lot of what I have written is most certainly outdated. I haven’t used any grocery app in the last few years and I’m pretty sure things today must look quite different.
Also, this is just me listing down my own personal experiences and it comes with my own set of needs and biases. I have seen people around me who never used Instacart and were perfectly happy with a different solution.