Using Spatial Analysis to drive delivery business expansion

Our business is all about connecting retailers with customers and in the past, we had been fairly conservative in the way we did that. We were able to use geospatial analysis to show just how conservative we had been and make the case for actually being much more aggressive as part of an overall growth strategy.

What have been some of the results?

Now that we’ve done it, what we’re starting to see is more people are trying Instacart because it’s more likely that if you sign onto the app, you’ll see the grocer that you really like as one of the options and that gets people to try the service.

We’re also saying that it gets customers, both new and existing customers, to spend more. When you’re really excited about that retailer, you’re going to spend more. When you have a bigger variety of retailers, you’ll probably place some more orders throughout the month and sort of divvy up your spend across a few different ones.

What we’re seeing as for our retailers themselves, this is really an opportunity for them to gain access to entirely new customer bases. These aren’t folks who would typically come into their brick and mortar stores. And so it’s true incremental revenue for them. It’s deepening our relationships with them as well.

What does the future hold for Instacart and geospatial analysis?

So looking ahead, I continue to see a lot of opportunities to use geospatial analysis. So one is, you know, here in North America, I think we continue to push the frontier of who and where we serve and be more sophisticated in the way that we vary service levels, pricing, and other elements of the service, based on where you are relative to stores.

I think that will also be true, if and when we expand internationally, and making sure that when we’re setting up new markets from the get go that we’re using kind of robust geospatial analysis to do so.

‍