Instacart has continued to grow since its inception in 2012, offering services to about 70 million United States’ households from more than 200 retail partners according to their locations. One of the most recent additions to Instacarts’ platform is Sam’s Club and Aldi.
Aldi is mainly powerful because it adds a definite cost-friendly option to the arsenal of Instacart. With many divisions of Kroger also taking part, Instacart is now serving as the partner to eight significant grocers in the United States. It has also added quite a lot of prominent regional chains such as HEB and Wegmans, after the prevailing wisdom of the saying ‘if you cannot beat them, join them.”
Even the retailers who manage their e-commerce platforms, such as Ahold which has e-commerce forerunner Peapod, have also added Instacart in chosen markets to help offer an instant service. Instacart offers two delivery options, i.e., one-hour and a two-hour delivery option.
The company has also continued to invest heavily in the technology sector, with a filed patent that allows for self-checkout for the in-store shoppers, as this could suggestively speed up the process of picking and paying in the business.
Altogether, the company has been raising capital. The most previous being $200 million Series E financing round that has placed the company valued at a massive $4.2 billion.
Amazon is the present wrinkle in the business model. Earlier, Whole Foods used to be a partner as well as an equity investor in Instacart, with an estimation of about 10 percent of Instacart’s sales coming through the partnership with Whole Foods.
With the acquisition of Amazon, sales figures are beginning to change with strong influence as well as a new offering. Amazon in recent times publicized a free two-hour delivery via Whole Foods, with the service initially starting in four markets namely Austin, Dallas, Cincinnati and Virginia Beach. Since then, the service has expanded into Atlanta and San Francisco.
As usual, Amazon remains to be the leading player. Whole Foods offered a local infrastructure that was badly needed to its model, and it will need to sort through the number of options which are currently available like Prime Now, Amazon Subscribe & Save, Amazon Fresh to create a coherent and profitable retail strategy.
