Instacart: An online grocery store that delivers one-hour door-to-door

To sell things online, I'm afraid no one can compare to Amazon. However, in order to truly surpass the physical store and bring additional experience to the user, Amazon has been trying to promote http://www.aliyun.com/zixun/aggregation/37041.html "> Day service." However, the company's CFO, Tom Sukutak Tom Szkutak, said in a second-quarter conference call last week that "from an economic standpoint, there has not been a reasonable way to deliver services on a massive deployment day." ”

Since Amazon is building a new Order fulfillment center, it may not be easy if Amazon is embarrassed. However, there is still a start-up company defying challenges, not only to achieve the day delivery, and even to achieve 1 hours delivery.

Instacart Founded in early June this year, its founder Appa Mahta (Apoorva Mehta) once served as a supply chain engineer at Amazon. He has been involved in building Amazon's complex back-end logistics system, and hopes to use this experience to create a more efficient foreground and background grocery distribution experience for Instacart.

What does this mean for users? Currently, Instacart can only provide a simple mobile experience, and only for the iphone. In addition, because it is still in the early stages of development, it can only be downloaded by invitation.

Although Instacart eventually hoped that its 1-hour service would cover all products, it was still focused on groceries. This means that users can quickly buy agricultural products, alcoholic beverages, cooked food, snacks and toiletries. Their inventory comes from local grocery stores. Mahta also recruited a number of well-trained couriers to get their goods directly from the store and send them to the user's office or home. These couriers are paid on time.

The service is currently available in San Francisco, Mountain View and Paroorto, opening hours from 10 o'clock in the morning to 9 o'clock. The price is also very competitive, 1 hours to pay more than 9.99 U.S. dollars, 3 hours to pay more than 3.99 dollars. It is clear that distribution fees are the main source of revenue for Instacart, but it is not hard to imagine that they can also receive income compensation through their cooperation with the store and the integration project.

Users can associate a credit card with a Instacart application, browse the list of items, and then add a fancy item to the cart. When settling, you can select the two distribution timelines mentioned above. Instacart will be deducted directly from the credit card, the user does not need to pay the tip when receiving the goods.

Instacart is still in the early stages of development, so it is hard to tell whether the company can achieve the size of Amazon. But groceries are really a good starting point for testing business models. From an early experience, this service can indeed produce good value.

In enterprises such as Instacart, credibility is clearly a big unknown factor. However, Mahta said Instacart would refund the user if the order delivery time was delayed or could not be completed. From the outset, the establishment of strict policies is critical to the development of enterprises, after all, customer service will play an important role in the future success.

In the next one months, Mahta is also ready to release the Android version of Instacart, and in the next two months to launch the Web version. In order to attract users, Instacart currently offers a free shipping discount for the first order for new users.

Instacart URL: Instacart

Source: Sina Science and technology