Personal shoppers go to several stores
Instacart works through crowdsourcing: whoever has a car and a smartphone, can sign up to go shopping in several shops for customers that give their shopping list and preferential stores online. About 150 shoppers have already signed up. The company believes they will be able to shop very efficiently after some time.
The price depends on the total purchasing price and on the time given, but most customers opt for a delivery in less than two hours for a total shopping list of more than 35 dollars. The delivery costs them 3.99 dollar, about 3 euro.
Instacart takes things further than classic distributors, who only deliver own products to the homes of customers. The Californians want to make life easier for the growing group of consumers that is not loyal to one chain, but who finds out where he can get each item the cheapest.
Capital increase for national expansion
To expand the system from the East Coast to the West Coast, Instacart recently collected 8.5 million dollar of new investments. The investment fund Sequoia Capital lead that operation and Khosla Ventures and Gmail designer Paul Buchheit were among those to invest.
Instacart was founded at the end of last year by 26 year-old Apoorva Mehta, a former employee of Amazon. Using the new capital he is hoping to expand his service to at least ten big cities in the US by the end of next year.
