The Shelby Report of the West recently visited with Merrick Rosner, Instacart’s head of revenue and solution sales, independent grocery, to learn more about the company’s e-commerce platform Storefront Pro.
What is involved in training employees on how to use e-commerce platforms like Storefront Pro?
Storefront Pro gives grocers of all sizes the ability to customize their own branded e-commerce site and native app.
A key differentiator is that Storefront Pro has fully integrated fulfillment and delivery through Instacart’s network of about 600,000 shoppers across the country. This reduces the reliance on store labor so those folks can focus on other in-store priorities.
From a technical perspective, the platform is intentionally designed to be intuitive and simple for a retailers’ marketing and e-commerce teams to use. We provide dedicated on-boarding, training, self-serve tools, video tutorials and playbooks for executing against marketing and merchandising best practices.
In addition, retailers using Instacart Storefront Pro have access to a dedicated technical support team. This team provides hands-on guidance during onboarding and ongoing assistance whenever employees have questions or need help, reducing the need for extensive training and making adoption seamless for store teams.
Can you share an example of a curated landing page that can increase basket size (i.e., curated seasonal collections like family taco night and/or cross-category bundles, like a protein plus produce plus prepared sides)?
Storefront Pro makes it easy for the retailers to curate and promote experiences for their customers to make shopping easy and highlight their unique offering through collections.
For example, Rosauers created easy lunch ideas. Broulim’s curated easy meal ideas featuring their prepared items.
Most consumers use search to guide their online shopping, and with the artificial intelligence-driven search experience, the site can automatically curate items based on the query (see example here).
How do you turn retail media into a profit center (not a cost)?
Retail media technology is costly for retailers to build out on their own, and many don’t have the resources to do it, but not leveraging it can be a huge miss.
This is why choosing a trusted retail media solution, like Carrot Ads, is so important. When retailers adopt Storefront Pro, they also get access to Carrot Ads, which extends our performance-driven ad technology to partners, including grocers, and provides advertising demand from more than 7,500 brand advertisers that are in the Instacart Ads ecosystem.
For example, when Davis Food & Drug upgraded to Storefront Pro and leveraged built-in monetization of Carrot Ads, it saw two to three times its average monthly retail media advertising revenue.
Rosauers is another retailer that more than doubled average monthly monetization revenue compared to before it upgraded to Storefront Pro, further demonstrating the benefits of the platform’s built-in monetization.
How does Storefront Pro’s customization enable strong basket size through improved merchandising and storefront control?
Storefront Pro grows basket size by combining grocery-native merchandising, retailer-controlled customization and AI-driven personalization on a platform built specifically for how people shop for groceries.
It enables retailers to create high-impact moments natively through shoppable weekly ads, digital flyers, complex promotions and collections. Retailers maintain full control over storefront layout, campaign timing and product placement across web and mobile, allowing them to consistently spotlight seasonal moments, local assortments and margin-driving departments without engineering dependency.
Layered on top, Instacart’s grocery-trained AI powers smarter search, personalized recommendations, predictive upsells and relevant substitutions – helping shoppers discover more of what they want and add it to their carts with less effort.
Together, these capabilities reduce friction throughout the shopping journey, keep customers engaged longer and translate that engagement into fuller, more valuable baskets.
Powered by the constant innovation happening on the Instacart Marketplace, we also constantly introduce new features and enhancements that retailers can incorporate on their e-comm channels so they are delivering the latest and greatest user experience for their customers, which in-turn inspires repeat online purchases.