Instacart Expands With Merchandising Service

Instacart has an eye on improving the grocery industry from all angles.

Today, the grocery tech platform launched a new merchandising service for brands known as Store View, allowing its partners to access real-time inventory data via a combination of AI and computer vision technology.

The new service is enabled by Instacart’s army of gig workers, who now have access to additional earnings opportunities by simply taking videos of store shelves, one aisle at a time, while they fulfill orders.

Instacart chief product officer Daniel Danker said this new approach to inventory tracking could solve “one of the biggest challenges in grocery,” while pointing to the fact that a single store can carry over 30,000 products. Nearly 60% of inventory records are inaccurate, he said in a blog post while citing data from ECR Retail Loss Group, due to traditionally manual and error-prone inventory checking processes.

“Our Store View technology will then analyze these videos to identify products that are in stock and – more important – those that are out of stock, giving us and our partners even more accurate insights into what’s available, what’s missing in action, and what’s running low at any given moment,” Danker said in the post.

For Instacart, the impetus to improve inventory data is multi-fold. The more brands are able to sell via the platform, the more they’ll be able to grow their business and likely lean into Instacart’s suite of ad services. The company said this tracking service will also enhance its predictive models, meaning it will be able to estimate when an item will be back in stock based on historical data specific to each store.

Down the line, Instacart also plans to integrate this service into its Caper Carts, which already produce heat maps depending on where carts spend the most time during a single shopping trip. Eventually, the carts will feature outward-facing cameras that update inventory insights each time they pass through the aisles, generating new insights as frequently as every hour throughout the day.

The feature will roll out at select retailers in the coming weeks with additional accounts coming on line across the U.S. and Canada throughout 2025. Instacart highlighted that it currently fulfills “millions of weekly orders” from over 100,000 retailer locations; within those locations, the platform said it has “deep integrations” in each retailer’s inventory system.

Store View benefits both retailers and suppliers, Danker said. Additionally, helping to reduce out-of-stocks keeps customers happy and avoids the need for unsatisfactory substitutions within a grocery delivery ordered through the app. Instacart is tackling that challenge for consumers with the launch of another new feature: Second Store Check.

This service is available when an item is identified as out-of-stock. It automatically asks a second shopper to check if the item is available at another nearby store to avoid the need for a substitution.

“While we are proud that customers are happy with the replacements that shoppers make 95% of the time, our goal is to make substitutions unnecessary in the first place,” Danker said. “Each customer order updates our view of what’s in a store, and what’s not, one item at a time. Then there’s our network of approximately 600,000 shoppers, who already collect over 10 million data points daily as they pick orders, identify out-of-stocks, and make substitutions.”