Introducing Store View and Second Store Check – Delivering a Better Online Shopping Experience

"Sorry, that item is out of stock." Whether you’re shopping online or in-store, these are words no one wants to hear, especially when it’s a key ingredient for tonight’s dinner or the only healthy snack your kid will eat. 

Unfortunately, keeping track of inventory is one of the biggest challenges in grocery. A single store carries over 30,000 products, and even retailers don’t always have an accurate view of what’s on their shelves. A study by the ECR Retail Loss Group found that as much as 60% of inventory records are inaccurate. That’s because traditional inventory checks are slow, manual, and prone to error, leading to out-of-stocks that frustrate customers and hurt sales. On the flip side, excess inventory leads to inefficient use of retail space and waste. 

While we are proud that customers are happy with the replacements that shoppers make 95% of the time, our goal is to make substitutions unnecessary in the first place. That’s why, today, we’re taking it a step further and announcing Store View and Second Store Check – two major new advancements in online grocery technology that enhance our real-time understanding of what’s on store shelves, helping make Instacart the most reliable online grocery marketplace. These new solutions are possible because of our deep integrations with retailers’ inventory systems and millions of weekly orders placed across more than 100,000 retailer locations. Each customer order updates our view of what's in a store, and what's not, one item at a time. Then there’s our network of approximately 600,000 shoppers, who already collect over 10 million data points daily as they pick orders, identify out-of-stocks, and make substitutions. When we combine all of this information, Instacart can form a more accurate, real-time understanding of what's happening in a grocery store, so you get the ingredients you need when you want them. 

A Smarter Way to Track What’s in Stock

Store View combines AI and computer vision to power real-time inventory data tracking for partners across our platform. Using the Instacart Shopper app, eligible Instacart shoppers will soon have access to a new type of earning opportunity where they can take videos of store shelves one aisle at a time. Our Store View technology will then analyze these videos to identify products that are in stock and — more important — those that are out of stock, giving us and our partners even more accurate insights into what's available, what’s missing in action, and what’s running low at any given moment.  

Store View will help further enhance our predictive models, which are refined by our unmatched historical data — meaning if an item is out of stock, we can estimate when it will be back based on what’s happened before at a particular store. So if you place an order at night for early next-day delivery, we can predict whether the item is likely to be back on the shelves when the store reopens, and then verify that information in the morning. 

Store View will launch with select retailers over the coming weeks, with plans to scale to more retailers across the U.S. and Canada throughout 2025.

Caper Carts have the ability to take continuous inventory tracking to the next level. Our AI-powered smart carts already use advanced sensor fusion and edge AI for item recognition and location-based recommendations. We also produce heat maps of where carts are spending the most time for a fuller picture of what’s happening across stores and individual aisles. In the future, outward-facing cameras on our Caper Carts will give us and our partners a game-changing understanding of inventory down to the store level, updating our inventory insights in some stores as frequently as every hour throughout the day. 

A Second Chance to Get What You Need

Even with more precise inventory tracking, there will inevitably be times when the item you need just isn’t available at the store you chose at the moment your shopper is there. That’s why we’re introducing Second Store Check, a new way to source out-of-stock items from another location of the retailer selected by the customer.

Here's how it works. When a shopper can't find an item you ordered, we can automatically ask a second shopper to check if the item is available at another nearby store. For a customer shopping in-person, checking a second store might add at least 15 minutes to their shopping trip. But when shopping online via Instacart, a second Instacart shopper can often find that missing item in a matter of minutes – something other online grocery marketplaces simply can’t do. That's because over 50% of Instacart orders are accepted by shoppers who are already at or within a mile of the store. Thanks to our unmatched scale and density, a second shopper might already be shopping items for another order on the very same aisle as the item you're looking for.

Second Store Check will roll out across the Instacart marketplace in the coming months and we will be able to prompt it in the event a customer order needs a helping hand from a second shopper.

A Better Shopping Experience — Now and in the Future

With Store View, Second Store Check, and Caper Carts, we’re making online grocery more reliable, helping more customers get exactly what they want, and laying a foundation to help retailers and brands get better real-time insights through our technology in the future.