Flyers data ingestion

A flyer (also known as a grocery flyer or weekly ads) contains the deals that you want to advertise to your customers for a period of time. You can convert your print flyers to digital versions that are displayed on your storefront.

You can create the following types of flyers:

• Browsable. Customers can view deals on various items.
• Shoppable. Customers can view deals and add items directly to their cart.

For more information about the customer experience, see Flyers in the Storefront / Storefront Pro documentation.

Prerequisites

Before activating flyers on your storefront, you must work with the Business and Catalog teams to ensure that your data meets the following requirements:

• The sale or promotional pricing for items in your flyer must be sent to Instacart in your catalog inventory file.
• Price parity on flyer assortment. This is optional if not displaying PDF print.

Flyer data

To activate flyers on your storefront, you need to share your print flyers and other information with Instacart using SFTP. For a typical weekly flyer, you must send the data at least 1 day before the flyer is scheduled to be displayed, and no more than 7 days in advance.

The flyer data includes the following:

• Metadata file. Identifies the items in your flyers for each store and specifies when the flyer should be displayed. May also contain the data fields required to enable a shoppable flyer experience.
• Flyer data files. Provide details about your print flyer PDF files along with information used to map flyers to stores.

File requirements

The flyer files sent to Instacart must meet the following requirements:

• File format. Use the same file type and delimiter format as your catalog inventory files. For example, if you send inventory files as comma-separated values (CSV), your flyer data files must also be formatted as CSV.
• Filename. Use a consistent naming convention to help identify and categorize your files, for example:
  • weekly_flyer_20250415.csv
  • weekly_flyer_assets_20250415.csv
  • weekly_flyer_versions_20250415.csv
• File size: Files must be between 1KB and 5MB.

Send data using SFTP

To send your flyer data to Instacart, use the same process and credentials as your catalog inventory files. For more information, see SFTP access.

The folder for uploading flyer data files varies based on the file type. For more details, see Metadata file requirements and Flyer data requirements.