Departments

The department menu displays departments and collections for your customers to browse your store. Departments are folders that help organize your collections.

Both your Instacart Marketplace and Instacart Storefront sites include the predefined departments and predefined collections that are common in your line of business. Instacart automatically assigns the products that you offer for sale to the appropriate collections and departments. For example, ground beef products are included in the Burgers & Ground Beef collection under the Meat & Seafood department. Products that are not available for the customer’s current location or fulfillment method are hidden. If a department contains zero available products, the department is also hidden. Inventory is checked approximately every two hours.

In addition to the predefined collections, you can create retailer collections and add them to the menu. On Instacart Marketplace, retailer collections display after predefined collections. On Instacart Storefront sites, you can rearrange the order of departments and collections.

Navigation structure

To avoid complexity for customers, department navigation is limited to three levels. The first two levels display in the department menu and can include departments or collections. The third level displays on the page and can include collections only.

The following example shows the Meat & Seafood department:

• Level 1: Meat & Seafood is a department
• Level 2: Beef is also a department (also known as an aisle or sub-department)
• Level 3: Burgers & Ground Beef is a collection.

Department layout

If you are using the custom header, the header includes a department menu. However, you can choose to remove this menu and instead display departments in a sidebar.

• Collapsing departments into a menu item in the header provides more space on the homepage for customers to view your custom content, such as banners and campaigns.
• Always displaying departments in a sidebar provides an experience similar to Instacart Marketplace. Customers have access to departments at all times.

In both cases, the sidebar is visible when customers are viewing collection pages or search results pages.

The following example shows the default experience with the departments collapsed into a menu in the header:

The following example shows the departments always visible in the sidebar:

To change the department layout to remove the menu item and always display departments in a sidebar, contact your Instacart representative.

Configuration

To add departments and collections to the department menu, use Instacart Platform Portal.

Instacart is in the process of migrating retailers to use the latest tools. Depending on your migration status, you will have access to one of the following tools:

• For retailers who have migrated to the enhanced collections method, use the Merchandising > Departments tool. For more information see, Manage departments.

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  If you have questions about when your site will be migrated, contact your Instacart representative.

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  You can copy departments from your Instacart Marketplace storefront to your e-commerce sites, or from one e-commerce site to your other e-commerce sites. For more information, see Copy departments to a storefront.

• For retailers using the legacy retailer collections method, use the Merchandising > Retailer Collections tool. For more information see, Manage retailer collections.

• For retailers using the departments and aisles method, use the Catalog > Departments tool. For more information see, Add a department.

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  If you are using the departments and aisles method, changes to your navigation menu affect both your Instacart Marketplace and Instacart Storefront sites. If you are using collections, you can choose which storefront to update.