Changes to customer ratings

Dedrick –  3071 deliveries

We know that shoppers do their best on each batch to deliver great service. However, you’ve told us that it can be frustrating if a customer provides a low rating based on factors that are out of your control, like out-of-stock items or delivering multiple orders at one time. That’s why today we’re announcing new updates to our ratings system to ensure customer ratings are stable and fair. As always, you only need an average rating of 4.7 or above to stay prioritized for batches.

A new average rating calculation

Going forward your customer rating will now be calculated based on your last 100 ratings instead of your last 100 orders. Customers don’t always leave a rating on their order which makes one rating have more weight than it should. With this change, more ratings will be factored into your average, and a few low ratings won’t lower your average as much.

This change will be implemented moving forward from today, meaning ratings will not be backfilled from past orders but as you receive new ratings they will contribute to your average.

Additions to our ratings forgiveness policy

We’re also adding two new aspects to our ratings forgiveness policy:

Removal of two lowest ratings

Your average rating reflects the service you go to great lengths to provide and we want to be sure it’s fair. Starting today, once you have 100 ratings or more, we’ll now remove your 2 lowest ratings from your average. Previously, our policy removed your 1 lowest rating. This update reflects your feedback that factors outside of your control can make it hard to get it perfect every time.

Replacement issue low rating removal

It can be hard to find the perfect replacement for a customer, especially if they didn’t select a replacement for that item or aren’t available via customer chat. On these occasions we appreciate you making the Instacart suggested replacement for your customer and therefore if a customer later reports an issue with that replaced item, we’ll remove the low rating associated with that order.

As usual, Instacart’s rating’s forgiveness policy:

• Removes your 1 lowest rating prior to reaching 100 ratings in your average
• Removes ratings from customers who have given fewer than 4 stars on their last 5 orders
• Continues to remove a low rating if there is severe weather, low inventory at the store, if our systems detect customer fraud, app outages, unexpected incidents, and more.

With these changes you should experience more stability with your average rating and the rare low rating will have less impact. You still need an average rating of 4.7 or above to stay prioritized for batches, to learn more about how access to batches work check out our website.

Taking steps to ensure customers follow our community guidelines

We also took steps earlier this year to ensure customers are living up to our community guidelines and foster a community built on best intent. If shoppers report to us that a customer isn’t following our community guidelines, we’ll notify customers via email reminding them of our community guidelines and communicate that they are at risk of being deactivated. If we receive multiple reports, have provided warning to the customer and the behavior continues to be reported, we may remove the customer from the platform.

We’re committed to ensuring the Instacart platform is a community built on best intent. We look forward to continuing to implement your feedback and developing new features that care for you, the way you care for your customers. 

You can learn more about our commitments on our website Learn more>

Instacart

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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.