A demo of Instacart’s Caper Cart at the National Retail Federation’s Big Show conference in New York City showed off the option for a consumer to spin a virtual wheel on the smart cart screen for the chance to win a prize. Doing so resulted in a reward of $2 off along with a message that said, “Spin for another discount next time you shop with a Caper Cart!”
This example is one of Instacart’s forays into the company’s growing efforts to gamify omnichannel grocery shopping experiences, said David McIntosh, vice president and general manager of Instacart’s Connected Stores, in an interview.
Instacart aims to lean into “rewards that incentivize behavior that is going to be really good for our retailer partners and valuable for our CPGs,” McIntosh said.
What else could gamification look for grocers? It could include giving a prize to a person who shopped three times in the last two weeks, or encouraging people to build bigger baskets, McIntosh said.
“If you know that that shopper generally shops $70, and you want to get them to $80, you now have a mechanism to try to push them over the top,” he noted. “Or maybe you’re a CPG, and this is the third time you bought a certain Dreyer’s ice cream and you want to reward a consumer to get to that fourth streak.”
Using the cart’s location sensors and in-store navigation maps, McIntosh said Instacart can envision giving shoppers a challenge to find and scan certain products or types of products in various aisles.
“Ultimately, where we want to take it is Pokémon Go,” McIntosh said.
Instacart is eyeing how Starbucks offers games and rewards for its loyalty members, given that 80% of Caper Cart users shop with their retailer loyalty account linked, McIntosh said.
As Instacart looks to build out its gamification offerings, the company is also focusing on products, rewards and discounts for consumers, McIntosh said. To that end, the company is leveraging its technological prowess that allows it to see what people are placing in their virtual carts and Caper Carts, which products they have on the Instacart-powered shopping lists, what they’ve previously bought and how they’ve interacted with rewards and discounts in the past.
The cart’s location sensors and ability to understand which items people are selecting coupled with omnichannel capabilities that know what people previously bought online “are all the signals that create that foundation for us to deliver these amazing gamification experiences,” McIntosh said.
Eversight, the AI-powered pricing and promotions platform Instacart bought in 2022, plays a key role in elevating the in-store retail media and gamification opportunities with Caper Carts, McIntosh said.
Instacart envisions using Caper Cart screens to deliver personalized discounts, recommendations and rewards that tap into data and insights from Eversight: “A screen like that in a store that [a customer] is highly engaged with for 30 plus minutes during a shop ... is an amazing opportunity for us to take in the long-run the dynamic elements of Eversight and marry [them] with Caper,” McIntosh said.
Instacart is looking to boost the gamification components on its Caper smart carts as it furthers its omnichannel and retail media efforts. The company has bolstered its ads business in recent years and said that “advertising and other revenue” accounted for 28% of its total revenue for the first half of 2023, rising 24% year over year, to $406 million, according to a filing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission.
The company’s work in this area comes at a time when both national and regional retailers, including Albertsons, Walmart and Save Mart, have rolled out games tied to rewarding consumers or workers to incentivize certain behavior.
