Product Updates: Carrot Connect API

In March, we announced Instacart Platform, a suite of technologies to power the future of grocery. Core to our vision of building the technology to power the future of grocery is delivering a suite of modular solutions to serve retailers’ fulfillment and e-commerce needs. These modular solutions enable retailers of all sizes and levels of digital maturity to integrate Instacart’s capabilities directly into their existing technical architecture.

Below is a small sampling of the 50+ updates we’ve launched during the first half of this year, in support of this vision. If you’re interested in learning more about any of these features, reach out to your account manager or submit your information here. 

E-commerce capabilities

• Upsells and Replacements
  • Developers can now leverage the same machine learning (ML) models developed for the Instacart App, to power their replacement and upsell suggestions. This functionality helps retailers drive personalization, and improve metrics such as fill rate and basket size through better replacement and complementary item recommendations. 

• Instacart+ Benefits via Connect
  • Retailers using Connect now have the option to extend Instacart+ benefits to their owned and operated sites. The benefits for Instacart+ members shopping on a retailer’s site may include a reduced service fee, a waived delivery fee, and a 5% discount on pickup orders. 

Fulfillment capabilities

• Improvements to Order Status Page
  • For retailers looking to improve their post-checkout experience, the Order Status Page is an Instacart hosted, turnkey solution designed to support any order type (pickup, delivery, or last mile delivery), and can be customized to look and feel like an extension of the retailer’s storefront. 

• Order Feedback API
  • Retailers can now provide customers with the ability to provide star ratings for their shopper’s performance, highlighting what the shopper did best, and leaving a thank you note for a job well done. This allows retailers and Instacart to continue to improve shopper performance and the customer experience.

• Priority ETAs
  • Continue to bring the best of Instacart Fulfillment to your site. Retailers can now offer Priority ETA service options as a new way of displaying the fastest delivery windows that customers can select by using a more precise time window to deliver a better customer experience.

• Meals support 
  • Developers can now integrate meals into their fulfillment flows. With this new feature, Instacart supports meal prep by providing shopper arrival time details so retailers can ensure that food is prepped, fresh and ready to go when shoppers arrive to pick up the order. 

• Service option filters
  • Gives retailers control over which service options are presented to their customers, ensuring compatibility with a given retailer’s desired UX.

• Expanded event callback notifications 
  • For Connect retailers who are integrating with Connect to power their pickup experience, these notifications allow retailers to better coordinate between the Instacart shopper and the customer. Ability to now get notifications for: when a runner is bringing a pickup order out to them, when the customer cannot be found by the runner, when there isn’t a runner available, and when the pickup geofence has been reached. Retailers can also receive real-time coordinates of the order’s location throughout the delivery process. 

• Shortlinks for Android
  • Android users can now open the Order Status Page (OSP) from short links in SMS notifications when receiving order status alerts, making it easier to track their Connect-powered orders.

• Operations dashboard improvements
  • Retailers can now filter by order status, gain insight into ETAs and actual times throughout the fulfillment journey, pinpoint urgent orders, cancel/reschedule/create a new order, and search via Order ID or Customer Phone Number directly from the dashboard.

Developer Experience

• Fulfillment Sandbox and Test API
  • This new functionality enables developers to manage their own order and fulfillment testing, and validate their integrations in a non-production, test environment.
• Redesigned documentation hub 
  • The site was redesigned for easier navigation of all available APIs as well as enhanced support across all devices and screen sizes.
• Post-Checkout tutorials 
  • Post-Checkout tutorials for retailers who want to design and host their own orders status page, including documentation for implementing order flows, item replacements, shopper chat, and pickups. Each page includes detailed step-by-step instructions, code examples, and sample responses to make it as easy as possible to build a post-checkout experience.

Interested in learning more about Carrot Connect APIs? Reach out to your account manager or contact us directly here.

Instacart

Author

Instacart is the leading grocery technology company in North America, partnering with more than 1,400 national, regional, and local retail banners to deliver from more than 80,000 stores across more than 14,000 cities in North America. To read more Instacart posts, you can browse the company blog or search by keyword using the search bar at the top of the page.