Instacart enhances real-time store inventory visibility
Instacart is obtaining a better view of what’s in stock at stores it fulfills orders from.
The grocery technology company is releasing two new solutions called Store View and Second Store Check, both designed to improve its real-time understanding of what’s on store shelves.
To support these solutions, Instacart is leveraging integrations with retailers’ inventory systems, as well as data from its customer orders and its approximately 600,000 shoppers, who collect more than 10 million data points daily as they pick orders, identify out-of-stocks, and make substitutions.
Following are highlights of each new store inventory-tracking solution:
Store View
Store View combines artificial intelligence and computer vision to enable real-time inventory data tracking for partners across its platform. Using the Instacart shopper app, eligible Instacart shoppers will soon have access to a new earning opportunity where they can take videos of store shelves one aisle at a time.
Instacart’s Store View technology will then analyze these videos to identify products that are in and out of stock, providing more accurate insights into what’s available, missing or running low at any given moment.
The company will also use Store View to help further enhance its historical data-based predictive analytics models, meaning if an item is out of stock, it will be able to estimate when the product will be back based on what’s happened before at a particular store
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Store View will launch with select retailers over the coming weeks, with plans to scale the solution to more retailers across the U.S. and Canada throughout 2025.
In the future, Instacart also plans to add outward-facing cameras on its Caper Cart “smart carts” to help obtain a fuller picture of what’s happening across stores and individual aisles.
Second Store Check
Instacart is also introducing Second Store Check, a new way to source out-of-stock items from another location of the retailer selected by the customer. When a shopper can’t find an item they ordered, Instacart will be able to automatically ask a second shopper to check if the item is available at another nearby store.
Second Store Check will roll out across the Instacart marketplace in the coming months and the company will be able to prompt it in the event a customer order needs assistance being filled from a second shopper.
"With Store View, Second Store Check, and Caper Carts, we’re making online grocery more reliable, helping more customers get exactly what they want, and laying a foundation to help retailers and brands get better real-time insights through our technology in the future," said Daniel Danker, chief product officer for Instacart, in a corporate blog post.
