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.
Big and bulky items are items that are up to 3×3×5 ft and up to 60 lbs. Instacart uses your catalog data to identify and manage orders with big and bulky items.
After customers place an order with big and bulky items, Instacart sends order status notifications to your customers. If you want your site to own all customer communications, you can turn off the Instacart messages. Your site can instead use the event callbacks that it receives from Instacart Connect to trigger sending your own status messages to your customers. For more information, see Event callbacks.
Many big and bulky items might also be high-value items that require certified delivery. Certified delivery requires customers to sign for the order before the order is released into their possession. For more information, see Certified delivery.
Example journey
The following example describes an order with big and bulky items:
- The customer visits the retailer’s e-commerce site and selects delivery.
- The customer adds big and bulky items to their cart and places the order.
- Instacart creates the order.
- The customer receives an SMS message with a link to the Order Status page.
- The customer receives a notification about order confirmation.
- Instacart dispatches the order to a shopper who drives a large vehicle and has opted-in to shop batches with large items.
- The shopper shops the order.
- The customer receives a notification that the shopper has checked out and the delivery is on its way.
- The customer receives a notification that the delivery is arriving.
- The shopper arrives at the customer location and delivers the ordered items.note
If the order contains high-value items, the customer must sign for the order before the order is released to them.