Customer communications
Your customers can receive order status notifications and chat with shoppers via SMS. To add SMS capabilities to an application, you have the following options:
You can also communicate with customers by implementing a post-checkout experience where customers track their orders and interact with shoppers. For more information, see the Post-checkout Guide.
Instacart sends messages
With this model, Instacart sends status notifications to the phone number of the customer associated with the order. Customers can also chat directly with shoppers who are using the Instacart app. As a result, this is the preferred model for delivery and pickup workflows that involve the app.
Instacart Connect does not send marketing messages to your customers.
In your checkout experience, you have two options to obtain the customer’s consent to receive text messages. First, you can expose a UI control, such as a checkbox, that requires customers to explicitly opt-in to SMS and then use their response to assign the appropriate value to the Connect order’s SMS opt-in field.
Sometimes customers might want to give consent after they’ve placed the order. To enable this feature, contact Instacart Customer Experience.
Alternatively, your checkout experience can display a disclaimer informing customers that, by placing the order, they consent to receive order notifications via SMS. If you adopt the disclaimer approach, your application can hard-code the SMS field or use its default setting.
If your site does not send the customer’s preference in the create or update order request, the following are the default settings:
- In delivery and pickup workflows, SMS messages are turned off.
- In last mile delivery workflows, SMS messages are turned on.
Retailer sends messages
If you want to own all SMS communications, you can choose to turn off Instacart’s text messages. Instead, you can use Connect event callbacks to trigger workflows that send messages to your customers. In this model, shoppers can't communicate with customers. As a result, it's most suitable for partner pick and last mile delivery workflows.