Instacart
Building for a specific problem, but neglecting a complete solution
Instacart is a grocery delivery marketplace that connects users to over 1,800 retailers across North America. For a delivery fee and an optional $99/year membership it dispatches a personal shopper to fulfill and deliver users grocery orders, often within the hour.
The app
Key Friction Points:
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The app requires you to shop store by store with no way to see where your full cart is cheapest across retailers
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There's no native meal planning or recipe import tool, so the cognitive work of deciding what to buy still falls entirely on the user
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With so much meal inspiration now coming from platforms like TikTok, YouTube, and Instagram, there's no way to go from a video or post directly to a grocery list; users are left manually transcribing ingredients into a notes app
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The pickup option exists but offers no additional planning intelligence, making it functionally identical to what any grocery chain already offers for free
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Instacart solves the problem of providing grocery delivery capabilities for people who don't want to physically grocery shop, but the in-app experience does not exactly make grocery shopping "easier" or less annoying.
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Instacart was built around a single pain point: the physical act of going to the grocery store. For the user who finds that unbearable (the time-strapped parent, the elderly shopper, the busy executive), it’s an easy yes. But that leaves a large group of potential users untapped.
The middle user finds the physical act of grocery shopping inconvenient but not unbearable, so delivery assistance alone doesn’t justify using the app. They need help with the cognitive load: planning meals, working out what to buy, and knowing which store will be cheapest for their cart. Instacart offers none of this natively.
Instead, it mirrors the in-store experience: browse by store, scroll the aisles, build your cart item by item. The trip is gone, but everything that makes shopping mentally exhausting remains.
The gap
I wanted to know if this gap was only frustrating to me or if other people felt the same. I asked Claude to run a thorough search of websites like Reddit, Blind, and other customer review platforms to compile a summary of the most common complaints about Instacart. The main complaints clustered around the same themes: inconsistent pricing, a cart-building experience that feels like more work than it saves, and a substitution problem that sends users back to the store anyway.
The ability to compare prices across retailers is such a glaring hole that a Reddit user actually built and published a free third-party tool that compares a user's cart across Instacart retailers since the app doesn't offer it.
While this tool no longer works, independent startups like BetterCart have since built entire products around the same gap. When third parties are rushing to solve a problem that sits squarely inside your core experience, it's a real issue.
Validating the problem
With recent advancements in Artificial Intelligence, Instacart has a big opportunity to incorporate AI-powered features that address some of the frictional areas of grocery shopping. This could drive the conversion of passive or uninterested users into avid users, and even paid subscribers.
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Grocery delivery has become a very competitive space with a lot of players, including grocery retailers themselves. In order for Instacart to continue to grow, it has to differentiate itself from its competitors in a meaningful way.
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Delivery is no longer a differentiator. Grocery retailers now offer their own pickup and delivery, and apps like DoorDash and Uber Eats deliver groceries too. The problem Instacart set out to solve is increasingly being solved without it.
That leaves Instacart as a middleman for a service users can get elsewhere. To justify a subscription, it needs real features that remove the mental overhead of grocery shopping: planning meals, building the list, finding the best price. Those are things no single retailer’s app is positioned to do across stores.
Why this matters
Proposed Prototype
Restructure the Instacart app around intent rather than store inventory. I used Claude & Figma to help me prototype the solution:
Reimagining the core entry points
Core entry points are modified for a more holistic experience
Instead of opening to a directory of nearby stores, the app presents three clear entry points: My List, Shop a Store, and Reorder to give repeat users quick access to past deliveries.
Grocery planning is easy with My List
My List is the planning space. It is a collection of ingredients and quantities that a user can build, refine, and revisit without committing to a store or price.
The traditional shopping experience is preserved with Shop a Store
Shop a Store preserves the legacy browse experience for users who already know where they're going and what they want.
Helping users plan & track their grocery lists
Taking grocery planning out of your notes app
There are two kinds of grocery shoppers: people who shop generally for ingredients to cook and create with, and then there are people who prefer to plan out their meals and buy only what they intend to cook within a certain span of time. The My List planning feature offers tools to support both.
Adding the ability to shop by recipes
Manually adding ingredients to the grocery list via typing or voice is a straightforward option available to all users, but how frustrating is it to form a list while trying to remember each of the ingredients for 3-4 different meals? Users now have the option of creating digital recipe cards to store their favorite recipes in advance. If they intend to make a recipe and want to include its ingredients in their grocery list, they can simply toggle the recipe for inclusion, and the grocery list will populate with all required items. Still have a few ingredients left from the last time and don’t need to repurchase everything? No problem. The user can still manually remove items and refine their carts as they see fit.
Creating new recipe cards from Social Media content
Now, more than ever, people are inspired to cook meals based on TikTok, Instagram, or YouTube tutorials. Instead of starting and pausing the video multiple times to try to put together an ingredient list, a user can share the video to Instacart through a native share integration or a share link. Using AI, the app would then parce the video for an ingredient list and create the digital recipe card for inclusion in their grocery list. I've included an example of how it might look if a user shared a recipe from YouTube.
Adding intelligence to the checkout process
Comparing prices to help users save money
Once a list is built, the Compare Prices feature becomes available. The app checks the user's cart against nearby retailers and shows which stores offer the lowest total for that specific combination of items, factoring in availability, so users aren't comparing carts with different content. The rest of the checkout functionality doesn’t materially change from Instacart's current design.
There are a few tradeoffs that come along with implementing these features at scale:
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Restructuring the home screen around intent rather than store inventory is a big departure from how Instacart currently operates, and risks disorienting frequent users who are used to a store-first interface. While the interface i've designed feels intuitive, a proper feature rollout would be a good idea to help users transition
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Recipe parsing from social media depends on AI reliably extracting ingredients and quantities from video content, which varies widely. Some creators show ingredients on screen, others only mention them verbally, and accuracy will vary by format
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Price comparison is only as reliable as each retailer's underlying pricing and inventory data. Additionally, There may be material business interests that affect whether a price comparison feature harms sponsored content or other revenue streams Instacart has provided for the retailers that currently participate on the app. Exercising creativity in the language, messaging, or design prominence of the feature and how the options are presented to users may be necessary to avoid damaging those relationships or interests.
Tradeoffs
Adoption
% of active users who create a grocery list or import a recipe
Conversion
% of grocery lists that convert to a completed cart
Adoption
% of users that use the Compare Prices feature before checkout
Engagement
Order frequency/ cart size for users who use planning tools vs. those who don't
Utilization
% of users who use planning tools but don't place orders
Success here isn't just about orders, it's about how well Instacart can integrate itself into the average person's grocery shopping process. Adoption of the planning tools, how often that planning converts into a completed order, and whether users are sticking around over time are the core signals. It's also important to initially monitor the users who use the planning tools but never place an order, because that could be an indicator for the value in offering the planning feature suite as a standalone premium paid membership tier.
How I'd measure it