Instacart has unveiled Connected Stores, a bundle of six new technologies that layer on top of current offerings, helping grocers bring together online ordering and in-store shopping for consumers.
Connected Stores creates a unified, personalized experience for customers by enabling them to move between a retailer’s app or website and its in-store experience. Together, Instacart and Good Food Holdings will open the first Instacart Platform-powered Connected Store at Bristol Farms in Irvine, California.
As part of Connected Stores, Instacart is announcing six new Instacart Platform offerings: the new Caper Cart, Scan & Pay, Lists, Carrot Tags, FoodStorm Department Orders and Out of Stock Insights. These new technologies will connect with Instacart’s e-commerce solutions, including Storefront Pro.
The six new Instacart platform technologies are:
- The AI-powered Caper smart carts are equipped with scales, sensors, touchscreens and computer vision so that customers can navigate the store and check themselves out without manually scanning items. The cart features stacked charging, allowing grocers to charge batches of carts at once and eliminating the need to charge carts individually.
- Scan & Pay allows customers to scan items as they shop and pay for them from their mobile phones so they can skip checkout lines. It can also link the items you buy in store to customers’ online shopping accounts, making it easy to buy them again.
- With Lists, customers can sync their shopping lists from the Instacart App or a grocer’s Instacart-powered app or website to a Caper Cart by scanning a QR code. The Caper Cart helps customers locate the items they are shopping for and automatically checks them off their list as they are added to the cart.
- With Carrot Tags, retailers can connect electronic shelf labels to Instacart Platform to add functionality such as pick-to-light capabilities, which allows people to select an item on their phone and flash a light on its corresponding shelf tag, making it easier to find the products they’re looking for.
- The FoodStorm order management system helps retailers manage orders for items, such as baked goods, hot items and deli sandwiches while customers are shopping. It enables different prepared foods departments within a store to collaborate so that they can have customers’ orders ready at just the right time.
- Out of Stock Insights is an API that helps retailers provide automatic, real-time alerts to employees when items are running low or out of stock. For retailers, this can result in fewer missed sales opportunities; for customers, it increases the chances they can find exactly what they are looking for.
“At Good Food Holdings, we’re proud to provide our customers with a personalized shopping experience – whether they’re opting to build their baskets online or joining us in-store. As customers have adopted delivery and pickup over the past year, we’ve found it important to evolve our business with omnichannel customers at the forefront,” said Neil Stern, CEO at Good Food Holdings.
“In partnership with Instacart, we’re excited to introduce multiple ways to checkout with Caper Cart and Scan & Pay, while driving inspiration through Lists and Carrot Tags. Instacart is an innovator in grocery technology, and we’re thrilled to be their partner and debut the first Connected Store at Bristol Farms.”
To learn more about Connected Stores, visit instacart.com/company/connected-stores.
