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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.

Instacart requires that you pass on the delivery savings to the customer in a visible way. The savings are reconciled as part of your regular Instacart billing. To request account linking, contact your Instacart representative.

Example user journey​

The following user journey provides an example of a customer experience that you might design. The journey assumes that the customer has not yet linked accounts.

In this example, the action that launches the linking request is placed in the customer’s account profile page. You could add this action to the checkout flow as well, so that the customer sees it before the order is sent to Instacart. Discuss your options with your design team and your Instacart Connect representative.

  1. A customer signs into your retailer site and their account profile page appears.
  2. The customer clicks a Link Instacart Account button. An Instacart page appears.
  3. If the customer isn't logged in to their Instacart account, they are prompted to log in. The image show the login page with the following text: Welcome back! Log in with your email and password.
  4. On the Authorization Required page, the customer clicks Allow. The image shows the Authorization Required page with the following text: Authorize the retailer to use your account? The application can read your name, email, and make requests on your behalf. There are two buttons: Allow and Deny
  5. The customer is redirected back to the retailer site. The page they land on is set up in advance with Instacart. The retailer site verifies the response from Instacart and completes the linking steps.
  6. The customer is returned to their account profile page. A message confirms whether the link was successful. A linked customer no longer sees the Link Instacart Account button on their account profile page.
  7. The next time the customer checks out with an order for delivery, they see their Instacart+ membership delivery savings in the order total summary.

Flow​

The following diagram shows the flow of calls to the API to link accounts and to get the status of the Instacart+ membership from a linked account. For implementation instructions and sample calls, see How to link an Instacart account.

The diagram shows the same workflow described in the how-to guide.

Technologies used​

Account linking relies on the following technologies:

  • Login with Instacart. Allows a customer to sign in to their Instacart user account and generate an OAuth2 authorization code.
  • Doorkeeper. Provides support to the OAuth2 authorization code flow and the token endpoint to generate the linking token with the account_linking scope.
  • Common Identity. Allows users to be linked by associating them with a common identity. Each user can be associated with at most one common identity, and a common identity cannot be associated with more than one user with the same user isolation context.

Your customers can remove the link between accounts by contacting Instacart Customer Experience. Your site should include a help tip or FAQ that tells customers how to remove the link to their Instacart account.

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