For most people, Instacart starts as a small moment.

You are halfway through making dinner and realize you forgot the main ingredient. Or it is Sunday night, you are exhausted, and the idea of walking through a fluorescent grocery store feels impossible. You open an app, tap a few times, and a stranger shows up with your groceries.

That app is Instacart.

But in 2025, Instacart is much more than “that grocery delivery app.” It is a grocery technology platform, a retail media network, and a serious revenue channel for grocers and CPG brands across North America.

In this guide, we will walk through what Instacart is and how it works for four different groups:

• Customers who place orders

• Shoppers who fulfill them

• Retailers who plug into the platform

• Brands that advertise and want to win in retail media

If you are a marketer, this is your chance to understand Instacart in the same way you already understand Amazon or Walmart. If you are a customer, it will give you a clear, no jargon view of what happens behind the scenes every time you tap “Place order.”

What Instacart Actually Is in 2025

Let us start simple.

Instacart is a marketplace that connects people who want groceries with people and stores that can supply them. Customers shop through the Instacart app or website, choose from nearby retailers, and a personal shopper picks and delivers the order.

The company behind it all, Maplebear Inc., now trades on the Nasdaq under the ticker CART after its 2023 IPO. It is headquartered in San Francisco and operates across thousands of cities in the United States and Canada. More than 1,400 retail banners spanning roughly 80,000 to 100,000 locations use Instacart to power some part of their e commerce.

If you are Instacart, you think about the world in two layers:

• The Instacart app, where customers see logos they recognize, browse store aisles, and order groceries for delivery or pickup.

• The Instacart Platform, which is an entire technology stack for retailers that want online storefronts, fulfillment tools, and in store technology like smart carts and in store navigation.

One is the face customers know. The other is what makes it possible for a mid sized regional grocer to feel like it has Amazon level digital capabilities without building everything from scratch.

How Instacart Works for Customers

From the customer’s point of view, the flow feels delightfully boring. That is the point.

You download the Instacart app or visit Instacart.com, type in your address, and Instacart shows you a grid of nearby stores that deliver to you. You might see national chains, local favorites, wholesale clubs, pharmacies, pet stores, and big box retailers. In many cities you can shop multiple stores at once, with each store keeping a separate cart and shopper.

You pick a store, search or browse for the items you need, and add them to your cart. When you tap into a product, you can often add a note for your shopper or choose a preferred backup if that item is out of stock. Want that specific oat milk and not another brand, no matter what? You can tell the app to refund instead of substitute.

At checkout, you choose between delivery and pickup, pick a time window, and add your payment details. You will also see the recommended tip and can adjust it up or down. Once you place the order, the app shows you when a shopper claims the batch, what they are picking, and when they are on the way. You can chat back and forth if they have questions, or if you need to update the order in real time.

Under the hood, Instacart is juggling inventory, routing, and labor to make this feel smooth. On the surface, you see a familiar e commerce pattern that sits comfortably next to apps like Uber, DoorDash, or Amazon.

Delivery, Pickup, and Beyond

Instacart started with doorstep delivery, but the model is more flexible now.

Delivery is still the default. In many dense neighborhoods, “as fast as 30 minutes” is a common promise, while suburban and rural areas lean more on same day or scheduled delivery windows.

Pickup is a quiet workhorse. If you choose pickup at checkout, store staff or Instacart shoppers pick your order and stage it near the front of the store. You park, check in, and someone brings your order to your car or a dedicated counter. You avoid the delivery fees and still save the time in aisles.

Instacart is also nudging into restaurant and prepared food territory through partnerships that let Instacart+ members access certain restaurant deliveries and club store prepared meals inside the same app. It is not trying to replace dedicated food delivery platforms overnight, but it is steadily expanding what “groceries” means in practice.

What It Really Costs to Use Instacart

One reason Instacart can feel confusing is that there is no single price tag. Instead, there are a few layers that stack on top of each other.

The first layer is fees. On a typical order you might see a delivery fee, a service fee, and in certain situations a busy or long distance fee. Large, heavy orders can add a heavy order fee. Local rules add their own line items, like bottle deposits or bag fees.

The second layer is product pricing. Retailers set their own prices on Instacart. Many choose to list prices higher than in store, often in the ten to twenty percent range, to cover the added costs of picking and delivery. Others advertise “same as in store” pricing as a differentiator, especially clubs and price focused chains.

The third layer is tipping. Instacart suggests a default tip, but you can adjust it. This is not a small detail. Shoppers see the tip before they accept an order. If you offer a low or zero tip, your order may sit longer. If you offer a healthy tip, you often get a faster shopper who is more willing to go the extra mile on substitutions.

Finally, there is Instacart+, the optional membership. It costs around 9.99 dollars a month or 99 dollars a year and offers reduced service fees and waived delivery fees above a certain order minimum. Instacart recently lowered that minimum from 35 dollars to 10 dollars for members on many grocery and retail orders, which made it easier to justify smaller “top up” trips instead of one giant weekly haul.

Add all of that together and you get the real answer to “how much does Instacart cost?” For occasional users, it feels like a nice splurge. For heavy users who hold a membership, stack promotions, and value time over perfect thrift, it starts to pencil out.

Is Instacart Worth It for Customers?

The question behind most searches is not “what is Instacart” in a dictionary sense. It is “is this worth it for me?”

For a lot of households, the answer is yes. Between work, kids, caregiving, and commutes, time is often the tightest resource. Instacart has helped customers save more than a billion hours of shopping time collectively, according to the company’s own impact reports.

It also unlocks access. If you are recovering from an injury, do not drive, or care for someone with mobility challenges, getting groceries delivered is not a luxury. It is a basic requirement for staying stocked and independent.

The catch is price. If you are watching every dollar and live close to a store, the combination of higher prices, fees, and tips can sting. If you love choosing your own produce, you may never fully trust someone else to pick your avocados.

The simplest way to think about it is this: Instacart trades money for time and energy. If your household has more to gain on the time side than you lose on the budget side, it usually earns a permanent spot on your home screen.

How Instacart Works for Shoppers

Shoppers are the human link in Instacart’s four sided marketplace. Without them, there is no magic. There is just a long grocery list and an app that does nothing.

When someone becomes an Instacart shopper, they download a dedicated shopper app, complete onboarding, and pass a background check. Full service shoppers also need a vehicle and a valid driver’s license.

Instacart offers two primary roles.

Full service shoppers are independent contractors who accept batches, shop in store, and deliver to customers’ homes. They choose when to work and which batches to accept. In store shoppers are part time employees who pick orders within a single store, usually for pickup, and hand them off to store staff or other couriers.

When a customer places an order, that order becomes part of a batch. The shopper app shows shoppers which batches are available, including the store, estimated earnings, and distance. A shopper accepts the batch, drives to the store, shops the list, chats with the customer about substitutions if needed, checks out with an Instacart provided payment method, and delivers.

Their earnings on that batch typically combine three pieces:

• A base amount Instacart sets based on time and complexity

• Promotions when Instacart needs extra coverage in certain areas

• The tip the customer offered at checkout

Independent analyses and driver side data put typical earnings in a broad range, often around ten to twenty five dollars per hour after fuel and other costs, depending heavily on market, time of day, and tipping behavior.

If you are a customer, remembering that structure is helpful. A bigger tip does not just feel nice. It makes your order more attractive in a marketplace where shoppers are constantly choosing between competing batches.

How Instacart Works for Retailers and Grocers

From a retailer’s perspective, Instacart is both a distribution partner and a technology partner.

Imagine you are a mid sized regional grocery chain. Building your own end to end e commerce stack is expensive and slow. You need a website, apps, search, recommendations, coupons, payments, fraud prevention, order management, picking tools, driver management, and customer service. Or you can plug into Instacart.

Instacart’s Instacart Platform suite is built to solve that. Retailers can adopt white label storefronts that look and feel like the grocer’s own site, or they can pick individual modules like search, coupons, or fulfillment tools and embed them into their own digital properties.

On top of that, Instacart offers in store technology under the “Connected Stores” umbrella. That includes Caper Carts, which are smart shopping carts with built in screens and scanners, and in store modes in retailer apps that guide customers through aisles, surface digital deals, and help them skip long checkout lines.

The business case looks like this:

• Instacart brings incremental online demand from affluent, high spending customers that many grocers struggle to reach on their own.

• It claims to have driven more than 22.5 billion dollars in additional revenue for grocers and helped create or sustain over 237,000 grocery jobs, with a meaningful share at small and independent stores.

• It shortens the time between “we want an online grocery experience” and “we have one in market.”

The flipside is control. Retailers who lean heavily on Instacart have to accept higher on platform prices, tighter delivery windows, and a less direct relationship with customers. Search results and promotional placements happen inside a marketplace that Instacart itself manages.

The grocers who tend to win long term are the ones who use Instacart and invest in their own direct e commerce presence, so they are not putting their entire digital future in one partner’s hands.

How Instacart Works for CPG Brands and Advertisers

If you run a CPG brand, your relationship with Instacart looks different.

You do not own the store. You are one of thousands of brands that show up on digital shelves. Your questions are simple:

• How do I show up when people search or browse for my category?

• How do I keep or grow my share against competitors?

• How do I prove that investments in Instacart actually drive incremental sales?

That is where Instacart’s retail media business comes in.

Instacart Ads in Plain Language

Instacart Ads is the advertising platform that lives on top of the marketplace. It lets brands promote products directly inside the buying journey.

The foundational unit is the sponsored product. When a shopper searches for “seltzer” or browses the “sparkling water” aisle, some of the results are organic and some are paid placements. Brands pay per click, and Instacart attributes sales back to those clicks, similar to how Amazon Sponsored Products work.

Instacart also sells richer display and shoppable placements on home, department, and list pages. These can be targeted based on audience attributes, category behavior, and past purchases, then measured against Instacart orders.

Under the hood, almost everything runs on an auction based cost per click model. You set bids, budgets, and goals. Instacart determines which ad wins which impression, and you pay when shoppers click.

Why Instacart Is a Real Retail Media Network

It is easy to think of Instacart as “smaller Amazon.” That misses the point.

Retail media as a whole is one of the fastest growing categories in advertising. Analysts estimate that retail media spend in the US surpassed 50 billion dollars in 2024 and continues to grow at double digit rates.

Instacart is a growing part of that. The company generated around 3.3 billion dollars in revenue in 2024, and a meaningful portion of that came from advertising products. One recent analysis highlighted that Instacart’s ad revenue grew around 10.5 percent year over year, while the number of active brand advertisers grew about 27 percent.

For CPGs, the appeal is simple:

• Instacart reaches customers in the act of building a grocery basket, not scrolling through a social feed.

• Instacart sees what people actually buy, down to the SKU, across many different retailers.

That makes every impression more valuable. You are not guessing at intent. You are speaking to a shopper who is clearly in market.

From On Platform to Off Platform

Instacart is also part of a broader shift in retail media: taking high intent retail audiences and making them available in other channels.

Through partnerships with companies like The Trade Desk and Roku, Instacart allows brands to build audience segments based on Instacart purchase data and target those audiences in streaming TV, online video, and programmatic display, then measure how those media buys influence eventual Instacart orders.

Imagine running a streaming TV campaign that specifically reaches:

• People who buy in your category but not your brand

• Lapsed buyers who have not picked up your product in a few months

• Loyal buyers you want to reward and deepen

And then tying that spend back to units sold inside Instacart. That is where retail media stops being “some extra budget we throw at sponsored products” and becomes a core part of a full funnel media plan.

When Instacart Belongs in Your Channel Mix

Not every CPG or retail adjacent brand needs to spend heavily on Instacart, but most should at least evaluate it.

Instacart tends to matter most when:

• Your products are frequently bought in weekly or immediate need grocery trips.

• Your key retail partners have strong Instacart presence.

• You already invest in Amazon Ads or Walmart Connect and want more coverage in grocery and convenience baskets.

If you sell high consideration, infrequent purchases that ship well, Amazon may still be the primary marketplace. If you play in beverages, snacks, household goods, health and beauty, frozen foods, pet care, or similar categories, ignoring Instacart means ignoring a growing slice of real world demand.

Instacart by the Numbers

Instacart’s growth story mirrors how quickly grocery shopping habits have changed.

Before the pandemic, the company was already growing. In 2019, estimates put regular Instacart users in the mid single digit millions. That number climbed sharply when COVID hit, with Instacart seeing years of projected growth compressed into a few months as customers looked for safer ways to get groceries.

By 2022, analysts pegged monthly active users above ten million, and the company had cemented itself as a default option in many households. Since then, the growth curve has been less dramatic but more durable. Instacart processed about 77.5 million orders in the fourth quarter of 2024 alone, up around 11 percent year over year.

Instacart’s own 2025 economic impact report puts some scale around that.

Since launch, Instacart says it has:

• Powered more than 1.5 billion customer orders

• Saved over 1 billion hours of shopping time

• Generated more than 22.5 billion dollars in added revenue for grocers

• Helped create or sustain over 237,000 grocery sector jobs

• Paid shoppers more than 24 billion dollars in aggregate earnings

You can reasonably debate how those benefits are distributed and what the counterfactual world would look like. What is harder to debate is that Instacart is now structural. It is baked into how millions of people get food on the table every week.

Is Instacart Right for You?

By now you can see that “what is Instacart” has different answers depending on who you are.

If you are a customer, the decision is personal. Do you value time and convenience more than you dislike fees and slightly higher prices. If yes, Instacart is probably already installed on your phone. If no, it might stay an occasional backup plan.

If you are a shopper, Instacart is one of several gig platforms you can use to earn flexible income. The appeal is that you control your schedule and can stack work with other apps. The risk is that earnings fluctuate and depend heavily on local demand, promotions, and customer tipping behavior.

If you are a retailer or CPG brand, the question is strategic. Instacart is now a meaningful way customers discover and buy products. It is also a growing retail media network built on real purchase data. The decision is not whether Instacart matters. It is how much, and what role it should play relative to your owned channels, Amazon, Walmart, and other retail partners.

That is where things get interesting for growth teams.

How Darkroom Helps Brands Win on Instacart

If you are reading this as a marketer, not a consumer, you are probably not looking for a tutorial on how to place an order. You are looking for a way to turn Instacart from a passive listing into a growth channel that pulls its weight.

That is the work Darkroom does with brands.

We look at Instacart in context. For a given client we start by mapping where Instacart sits relative to Amazon, Walmart, and other retail media networks, then sizing upside by category, retailer, and region. That tells us whether Instacart is an incremental growth lever or simply a hygiene channel.

From there, we get practical:

• Cleaning up catalog content so titles, images, and attributes actually win search and shelf placement

• Designing Instacart Ads strategies that balance always on defense with smarter offense on category terms and new launches

• Using off platform partnerships and measurement tools to connect streaming, programmatic, and retail media into one view

• Building reporting that separates true incrementality from “we showed up next to a sale that would have happened anyway”

The outcome is not just more spend on Instacart. It is a clearer picture of where Instacart helps, where it does not, and how to put every dollar of Instacart media to work inside your broader retail media mix.

If you are already active on Instacart and want to know whether you are leaving money on the table, that is the analysis we love to do.

Quick FAQ on Instacart

To close, here are a few questions that come up again and again.

Is Instacart owned by any grocery chain?

No. Instacart is an independent company that partners with more than 1,400 retail banners across North America. It is not owned by a single grocer.

Do I need a membership to use Instacart?

You can use Instacart without any membership and pay per order. Instacart+ is an optional subscription that lowers service fees and waives delivery fees on eligible orders above a minimum, which was reduced from 35 dollars to 10 dollars for many members in 2024.

Are Instacart prices higher than in store?

Often they are. Many retailers charge more on Instacart than they do on the physical shelf, sometimes ten to twenty percent more, to offset additional costs. Some retailers choose to match in store prices as a selling point.

How important is tipping for shoppers?

Very. Shoppers see your tip before they accept a batch. A higher tip can mean your order is picked up faster and handled with more care. Instacart suggests a default tip, but you can adjust it to match order size and effort.

Can any brand advertise on Instacart?

Brands usually need products listed with at least one Instacart retailer in eligible categories. Once that is true, they can activate Instacart Ads through the Instacart Ads console or a partner agency and start running sponsored products and other formats.