Instacart Gives Merchants and Brands New Views of Store Shel…
Instacart has unveiled software designed to let grocers and brands digitally view store shelves in real time.
The new solutions, announced Monday (Sept. 21), will “map the entire store down to individual products on shelves,” letting grocers and consumer packaged goods (CPG) brands virtually comb through aisles, understand what’s taking place and act in real time.
“Grocery stores are the most complex physical environments in retail. A single store carries tens of thousands of items and the floor changes by the minute as customers shop, brands restock, and associates move displays,” Ryan Hamburger, Instacart’s chief commercial officer, said in a news release provided to PYMNTS.
We’d love to be your preferred source for news.
Please add us to your preferred sources list so our news, data and interviews show up in your feed. Thanks!
“Traditional inventory systems weren’t built for today’s reality — they rely on estimates and periodic counts, leaving grocers and brands with an incomplete picture of what’s actually happening on shelves. By turning the insights Instacart generates every day into real-time intelligence for the physical store, we’ll give retailers and CPG brands a level of visibility that drives better business outcomes and experiences for every customer.”
The release noted that Instacart is using data generated by a network of around 600,000 shoppers who visit stores across North America more than 15 times per store per day on average, leading to more than 10 million unique data points each day.
That lets the company use that data that its shoppers collect from shelf scans to develop “a real-time view of what is happening on store shelves,” letting stores and brands see what products are available, where spikes and dips in demand are impacting inventory, and how in-store merchandising affects sales.
In other Instacart news, PYMNTS wrote earlier this month about the company’s new Clementine artificial intelligence shopping assistant, which merges a customer’s purchase history with real-time store inventory to create a cart from a single message, such as “high-protein easy dinners for two,” to use the company’s example.
As that report noted, the launch of Clementine follows similar assistants from grocery giants like Kroger and Albertsons. While each company is banking on its own industry edge, none of that “matters if the item isn’t actually on the shelf,” the report added.
“A recommendation is worthless the moment a customer shows up and the product is gone. That is the real race across grocery right now. Not which company builds the smartest AI, but whose inventory data is accurate and current enough to be trusted at checkout, store by store.”
