Dive Brief:
- Instacart announced on Wednesday it is now offering same-day and scheduled delivery for large non-food items.
- Under the “Big & Bulky” category on Instacart’s marketplace, customers can shop for furniture and home goods; electronics and appliances; sports and outdoors equipment; office supplies; and cleaning supplies. The bulky item delivery is also offered from “select” retailers’ Instacart-powered websites.
- With this newest service offering, Instacart is expanding delivery capabilities beyond its grocery focus and branching further into non-food categories.
Dive Insight:
Instacart positioned the new bulky delivery service as a way for customers to get both their groceries and orders of large items alongside each other. For retailers, the new service allows them to offer more of their catalog through Instacart, the company said.
“With football season just around the corner, Instacart’s Big & Bulky solution can provide customers with items like portable grills and tents for a tailgate or a 55” TV in case they’re watching from home — all in as fast as an hour,” Daniel Danker, chief product officer at Instacart, said in the announcement.
The addition of bulky item delivery comes at a time when mass merchants are seeing strong sales from their grocery assortments and some grocers are expanding into general merchandise categories.
Instacart said that Big Lots, The Container Store, Office Depot, Spirit Halloween and Staples are among some of the first retailers to use its new bulky item delivery option.
Carrot Delivery — a part of Instacart’s suite of retailer services — is powering the new bulky item delivery service.
Instacart gig workers who drive large vehicles can opt-in to shop “Big & Bulky” order batches, Instacart said. Based on workers’ responses from pilots that ran from May to July, its gig worker community has “responded positively to the new offering” with 97% of workers with eligible vehicles in the pilots opting to shop the bulky orders, Instacart said.
