My girlfriend and I have been using Instacart for quite some time now. Overall, the experience has been fantastic, mainly because of a bunch of free-delivery offers. While I really, really hope they stick around (especially with the addition of Whole Foods), almost every order has had some small problem. Usually these are substitutions of the items I really wanted, but occasionally we've gotten items that we didn't order. We weren't charged for the extras, and their customer service is absolutely top-notch. If anyone from Instacart is reading: please be careful to maintain your quality standards as you scale! I'm OK with the price premium and even delivery fees, as long as it's backed up with the current level of service. Great job, and good luck!
I hate it when the shopper buys something completely wrong (how do you mistake donuts for donut holes?). But...
> mainly because of a bunch of free-delivery offers
More than the grocery selection standards, I hope they work out pricing and demand. I should probably have sprung for the Amazon Prime-like pricing option and start planning more in advance, but lately I've run into problems where all the available delivery times the same day are gone before dinnertime or are like 5+ hours out at the earliest (wish they'd say that before I went browsing) and delivery fees are going up for the kind of grocery shopping I like to do (small number of items - now $7.99 delivery for under $30 - mostly from trader joe's that has an occasionally big markup from in-store prices).
This is on top of the annoyance that is the trader joe's storefront not being anywhere near as nice as the safeway one (picture quality sucks or doesn't even exist, mislabeled items, lots of missing items from store or listing things that I know aren't sold right now like egg nog)... and they're adding another big supermarket? Hrmph. (Yes, I have mentioned these problems to their customer support).
Love the service's convenience though, and their customer service is definitely top notch. Every time I think of wavering and just getting a Zipcar to go to Trader Joe's for half an hour I just think of the service I received in the past and change my mind.
Shopping is hard in general, but especially so when the list gets bigger. You end up making more circles through the store and it's hard for the human brain to validate that the 20 things in my cart are the same as the 20 items in the list. As far as error prone-ness, this is on the level of matrix multiplication ;)
There's a use case for Google Glass right there. Amazon already has the product recognition software problem fairly nailed. The person doing order fulfilment simply holds the product at eye level before placing it in the card, and it deletes from the list until there's nothing left.
Step two: integrate with inventory management so Glass tells the human where to go. Step three, replace the human with a robot and the store with the local distribution warehouse.
> it's hard for the human brain to validate that the 20 things in my cart are the same as the 20 items in the list
In this age of smart-everything, there's no help for that?
Seems strange.
Further, to make things even less difficulty, I'd think it'd be rather straight-forward to map out the select stores they go to in the extremely small set of markets they serve. Certainly considering this is their profession, no?
Some stores change their layouts around occasionally, mostly when new product comes in that needs space. I've seen at larger chains where nearly the entire grocery department switches overnight. I don't know if Trader Joes or Whole Foods does this, but that's something to take into consideration if you're mapping products.
Similar experience - their customer service is great, but the one time I tried using them they missed about a quarter of the items in my order (of only a dozen items). Their website was also an extremely buggy MVP - images didn't match what was delivered, and navigation was a mess. I like the idea, but I'll wait for them to iron out the kinks in their service.
