Every day, millions of people rely on Instacart to help get the food they need to feed their families and get back valuable time to spend with their loved ones. What started as an idea about making grocery shopping more convenient is now the largest online retail marketplace for groceries in North America. Today, with the help of more than 70,000 dedicated shoppers, Instacart connects customers to the local retailers they love by enabling the delivery of fresh groceries and everyday essentials from 15,000 stores across the U.S. and Canada.

As our business has grown, the technology and systems we use to make these orders possible have evolved. Helping deliver groceries from the store to a customer’s door in as fast as an hour requires a special combination of technology and the human touch. We know our shoppers care about delivering exceptional quality, and we’re deeply committed to doing our part to help you all be household heroes for loyal customers.

Beginning last year, we established a company-wide effort to enhance the shopper experience. We started by bringing teams together from across the organization to focus our efforts and connect our priorities directly to your feedback. Through extensive listening and collaboration with shoppers, we’ve identified key areas of opportunity to improve your experience. Some of these efforts began in 2018 and these same efforts and more will continue throughout this year.

In 2019, we want to ensure all shoppers know exactly what we’re focused on improving and how. Here are the five key areas we’ll be focused on this year:

Fair and Dependable Earnings

You asked for clearer earnings that represent the entire shopping experience. In 2018, we added features to give you more details about an order before accepting it. This included displaying the number of items in the order, calibrating for heavy items, adding clear distance payments, and more. Instead of a one-size-fits-all approach, we established a more balanced way to reward your efforts and put you in control. In 2019, shopper feedback will continue to play an integral role in the adjustments and improvements we make to shopper earnings.

Accessible Hours and Work Flexibility

When asking shoppers what they value most about Instacart, flexibility is always at the top of the list. We believe giving shoppers the flexibility to choose their own hours and set their own schedules is one of the most important benefits we can offer our community. Today, we have three different ways to sign up for hours: Early Access, Open Access, and Day Before. Based on your feedback, we’re closely reviewing these options and will be considering and testing more flexible ways for you to pick up hours in the future.

Reliable Support

Getting the support you need should be easy, whether you have a question or need help on an order in progress. We’re making significant investments to offer more personalized support options by improving our phone support and adding new support channels — like chat — directly in the shopper app. We also know that sometimes you just want to find a quick answer, so we’re also making improvements to our self-service Help Center to make it easier to navigate and find what you need fast. As importantly, we understand that part of making your jobs easier is to ensure our shopper app works well for everyone in the community. We strive to make every order a great experience, and we recognize the importance of an ongoing focus on our app reliability to help you shop productively.

Quality First

When it comes to providing the best customer experience, quality really matters. That means anticipating customer needs and giving shoppers better tools to deliver excellent customer service. We’ve recently added features like replacement recommendations to include customer preferences for out of stock items. In the coming weeks, we’ll begin testing new ways to help shoppers locate items faster and track down those tough-to-find products in the store. We’ll also be exploring more options to help give you better feedback and suggestions to make the most out of every order.

Learning and Knowledge Sharing

To deliver every order as promised, we need to equip you with the right information and offer opportunities to hone your skills. We’ll be investing in new tools, programs, and channels to connect shoppers, share more information, gather feedback, and continuously make improvements.

What’s Next

You will hear much more about these areas of focus throughout this year as we launch new features and improvements city-by-city. We will be sending direct communications when these updates are available in your area. In the meantime, please continue to provide feedback to our teams by emailing letters@instacart.com. We know we have a lot of work ahead of us and we want to thank you sincerely for being valuable members of our community. It’s our job to make your job easier and we’re deeply committed to investing in our shopper community and giving you the tools you need to deliver an excellent experience to customers and families.

David Hahn

Instacart Chief Product Officer