📄️ Fulfillment options
Fulfillment options are the methods that you can use to get orders to your customers. The fulfillment options you implement depend on whether your customers want the order delivered or want to pick up the order. The options also depend on whether you want to use your existing picking technology or want a shopper to pick the order using the Instacart Shopper app.
🗃️ Fulfillment user journeys
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🗃️ Compliance
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📄️ Account linking
Account linking allows your customers to link their Instacart account to the Connect user account. When a linked customer signs in to your retailer site, your site can verify their Instacart+ membership status and offer the customer a discounted delivery similar to what they receive when shopping through Instacart Marketplace. You might also want to offer other incentives to these customers to encourage them to shop through your retailer site.
📄️ Big & bulky
Big and bulky is a fulfillment capability that enables delivery for large items, such as outdoor furniture, home office supplies, appliances, and electronics. With big and bulky, you can offer more of your catalog online and provide your customers a wider assortment of items for delivery. For example, your customers can order and receive their grocery items and household goods alongside their large items.
📄️ Catalog
An accurate retailer catalog is the foundation of a successful full-service fulfillment workflow. When you share your catalog with Instacart, it enables Instacart Connect to include a list of items in the order that goes to the shoppers. If a shopper can't find an item in an order, they can suggest replacement items from your catalog.
📄️ Product quantity types
Each product in the catalog has attributes that indicate how quantities of that product are sold. For example, some products are sold and priced per unit, while others are sold and priced by weight. There are also variable weight products that can be purchased as a unit, but are priced by their weight.
📄️ Certified delivery
Certified delivery requires customers to sign for orders before the order is released into their possession. Certified delivery is used for high-value items. This delivery type provides you and your customers the peace of mind that comes with the successful delivery of high-value items.
📄️ Customer communications
Customer communications are handled through SMS messages. Messages include order status notifications and shopper-customer chat. When a customer opts in to receiving SMS messages, messages are sent to the phone number provided by the customer.
📄️ Desired windows
Desired windows represent requested delivery time periods. You provide Instacart one or more desired time slots and a single delivery location, and then the fulfillment engine checks whether capacity exists to fulfill the order.
📄️ Instacart+ memberships
Instacart+ memberships provide customers with benefits, such as free delivery, reduced service fees, and shared family benefits, when they shop through Instacart Marketplace. You can attract these customers to your site by honoring their Instacart+ membership benefits.
📄️ Instacart Platform Portal
When you sign up with Instacart, your retail organization receives access to Instacart Platform Portal (also known as Instacart Retailer Platform). Instacart Platform Portal is a secure browser application where you can view and manage catalog items, inventory, orders, and more. You control access to pages based on roles and user groups so that retail employees have access only to the data that they need to do their jobs.
📄️ Multi-banner retailers
Retailer organizations that operate affiliated stores or subsidiaries under different names, or banners, are referred to as multi-banner retailers. For example, The Garden might fulfill orders under both their grocery chain banner, The Garden Market, and their specialty wine banner, The Garden’s Fine Wines.
📄️ Order ahead meals
Order ahead meals are foods prepared by retailer employees and require some lead time to prepare. Order ahead meals require coordination between retailers and shoppers to ensure that the food is prepared and then delivered in a timely manner. Timely delivery is an important part of a positive customer experience for order ahead meals.
📄️ Order changes
After an order is created, the order can be updated, rescheduled, or cancelled. The ability to change an order depends on when in the lifecycle the change occurs. The following tables describe which changes are allowed and who can make them.
📄️ Order feedback
Your customers can provide feedback about the fulfillment experience. Feedback can be for the entire fulfillment experience or parts of the experience, such as the helpfulness of the shopper chat, the quality of replacement items, and the timeliness of the delivery.
📄️ Service options
In Instacart Connect, service options are time slots. Time slots might start from the time the order is created or they can be scheduled for a future start time. The time slot includes the time for the order to be batched, assigned, shopped, and received by the customer.
📄️ Shopper-provided item details
Shoppers can offer replacement items to customers even when the item is not in the catalog that was shared with Instacart. The shopper enters the item details manually in the Instacart Shopper app. These manually inputted item details appear in shopper-provided item details fields in the delivered callback and get order response.
📄️ SNAP and EBT
The Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) is a United States federal program that provides nutrition benefits to low-income individuals and families that are used at stores to purchase food. SNAP benefits are processed through the Electronic Benefit Transfer (EBT) debit card system. Shoppers can fulfill orders that are fully or partially paid with SNAP EBT cards.
📄️ Testing
Test your fulfillment workflows in a development environment to verify the workflows before moving to a production environment. You can test fulfillment workflows by simulating order status changes. Use the Sandbox API or the Fulfillment Testing Center to test workflows.