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Chances are, while shopping in your favorite supermarket, you may have noticed one or two people milling about, smartphone in hand, annoyingly fixated on the screen. Okay, this could be anybody, and for that matter, a person glaring at their phone may account for the better part of humans these days, but there's more. They do not look like store employees (they're not uniformed), and for some reason they have the nerve to pace up and down the store aisles, pluck items from the shelves, scan them and place items in their cart. Who in their right mind scans stuff with their own phones in a store? This strikes you as odd, but you let it pass only to have your curiosity and situational awareness get the better of you. You side eye the same person doing the same thing in another aisle not once, twice but... you've lost count. You begin to think to yourself, maybe I should start randomly scanning things in peoples stores, and technically, YOU CAN! You see the person you were inadvertently stalking is an Instacart shopper and yes, it is a job. It's their job to shop for other people who unlike you, and smarlty so, decided to kick back on their couch, use the instacart app to shop at their favorite store, select a couple of items and have someone shop and deliver for them all through Instacart. That in summary is Instacart.
Instacart is more than the app where customers shop for stuff. It is a turnkey order fulfillment platform seamlessly bringing together buyers, retailers and shoppers. by doing this Instacart has cemented itself in its niche as the Amazon Marketplace of grocery stores.
Instacart provides a website or app for customers. Customers can shop for items on the Instacart website or by downloading and using the Android or iOS app. As a customer you select a store and shop for items just like any other e-commerce website. When you have completed shopping you determine when and how you get your items. Instacart then works in the background with its partner stores and shoppers to get your order to you.
When you make an order on Instacart and schedule a delivery, one of two things may happen. Your order may be
dispatched to a full service shopper who drives to the store shops for the items and delivers them to you. or an
instore shopper in a partner store may shop for the items and an instacart driver only picks up the order and
delivers the items. This depends on the arrangement Instacart has with the store. For example Stop & Shop
may have their own in-store shoppers but ALDI may not.
Working as an Instacart shopper
Orders may be dispatched to shoppers as a batch. A batch consists of several orders and may have different stores.