Instacart Intros Same-Day Delivery to Fill Supply Chain Gaps

Instacart has debuted a tool to help distributors close gaps in their supply chains.

Will Call Delivery, announced Wednesday (April 2), is designed to make sure distributors can meet same-day “fill-in” orders — also known as “hot shot” deliveries.

“For more than a decade, Instacart has built its reputation on delivering grocery orders to households nationwide in as fast as an hour,” the company said in its announcement. “With Will Call Delivery, we’re bringing that expertise to distributors and business operators in need of rapid fulfillment, offering a seamless, same-day solution for the most urgent supply needs.”

According to Instacart, Will Call is a white-label application that lets distributors streamline same-day ordering via their sales reps.

Customers who need items quickly can contact their sales reps the way they normally do, and those reps can — with a few clicks — have an Instacart shopper pick up items from the warehouse and deliver to their end customers.

And to better address out-of-stocks or service customers that are far from the warehouse, distributors can also place orders from retailers on the Instacart Marketplace to make sure that customers are always quickly getting the product they require.

Instacart also recently introduced new features it said will increase the chances its customers will get the items they order, while also helping retailers and brands get real-time information about whether products are on the shelves.

Among the new features is Store View, which lets Instacart shoppers earn more by taking videos of store shelves. Instacart’s artificial intelligence and computer vision technology will analyze those videos to determine whether products are in stock, and then Instacart will use those findings to let customers know when a product they’ve ordered is likely to be available.

The launch of these products comes at a time when — per recent PYMNTS Intelligence research — more than 65% of grocery and retail merchants say they lack access to real-time supply chain data, even though more than 70% say such data is crucial for business decisions, highlighting a significant operational blind spot.

“The lack of data readiness also impacts a retailer’s ability to innovate, expand their customer base and even manage their supply chains efficiently, leading to potential issues like excess inventory costs,” PYMNTS wrote last week, adding that the research “emphasizes that becoming data-ready requires addressing both organizational silos and technical limitations to not only survive but thrive in an increasingly competitive market.”