From Marketplace to White Label: How Continuous Innovation Fuels Grocer Growth

Across grocery, the pace of digital change continues to accelerate. Consumers expect convenience, personalization, and reliability wherever they shop, and can quickly shift their shop if a grocery retailer cannot deliver. We see that evolution firsthand on the Instacart Marketplace, which processes millions of orders every week and generates a constant stream of learning about how people discover, choose, and reorder their groceries.

We took the same technology from the Instacart Marketplace, and made it available to power retailer owned and operated e-commerce storefronts. With our enterprise commerce platform, Storefront Pro, our goal is simple: help retailers turn those same insights into a competitive advantage on their own sites and apps.

Turning insights into retailer impact

Thanks to a shared enterprise-grade architecture every enhancement is tested at scale before it becomes available for retailer-owned sites.

On any given day, we run 100+ deployments and 300+ live experiments on Instacart Marketplace, continuously refining the shopping and fulfillment experience. Experimentation helps us identify what improves discoverability, conversion, and retention which we then develop in Storefront Pro. By leveraging insights from this continual learning, retailers gain the benefit of proven innovation without additional development cycles, risk or overhead.

Last year, we released hundreds of enhancements to Storefront Pro across web & native mobile—ensuring our retail partners are receiving the most impactful and proven innovation. And because Storefront Pro is built for flexibility, partners can enable only the capabilities that fit their brand strategy, merchandising priorities, or operational model.

Delivering value from continuous innovation

We’ve focused the Storefront Pro enhancements on delivering value to our retailer partners by delivering:

1. Frictionless shopping fundamentals: Foundational UX and search improvements, such as better filters, clearer product pages, and a simplified sign-up flow, make it easier for consumers to find what they need and complete their order with less clicks. Unique functionality like Family Accounts makes it possible for multiple users to collaborate on shared carts, track orders, and share benefits across household members and devices. New one-click onboarding allows users to invite or add family members directly during checkout or onboarding to further simplify engagement and increase order size.

2. Engaging and ownable experiences: New intelligent and immersive merchandising tools help retailers tell their own stories online, while driving product discoverability and larger baskets. Leveraging machine-learning-driven content and dynamic layouts, retailers can easily make their online storefront feel uniquely theirs while still benefiting from Instacart’s grocery intelligence and user experiences. By dynamically surfacing complementary or frequently purchased products across browse, search and check out, retailers can anticipate customer needs and instantly personalize to them.

3. Omnichannel loyalty and customer value: Features that improve transparency and trust—like clearer promotions, lifecycle incentives tooling and enhanced product information—build long-term relationships that keep consumers coming back. Retailers can now easily run and drive redemption for complex promotions with enhanced ways to surface rules and flag eligible products.

4. Fulfillment efficiency and excellence: Enhancing the robust fulfilment capabilities available with Storefront Pro, operational and UX updates reduce cancellations, improve substitution accuracy, and make fulfillment more reliable for consumers, shoppers and store teams alike. Even simple, smart triggers, like prompting consumers to verify their delivery address when their current location is far from their selected delivery address, helps retailers reduce associated costs from wrong-address orders, and improve overall delivery success rates.

Each release builds on the last, compounding value across the platform while maintaining retailer control and consistency.

Innovation as partnership

Instacart’s commerce platform, including Storefront and Storefront Pro, now supports more than 350 retailer banners across North America from local to national grocers. What unites them isn’t size or format—it’s a shared commitment to staying ahead of shopper expectations.

By bringing together learnings from the Instacart Marketplace, retailer feedback, and ongoing experimentation, we’re helping grocers of every size scale grow profitably, and deliver exceptional experiences more efficiently.

Learn more about Storefront Pro