Instacart Rolls Out a Smart Shopping Cart

Instacart is disrupting grocery shopping with games, meal suggestions, ads, store maps, and in-cart checkout — all on its smart Caper Cart.

Why It Hits: There’s probably nothing as lo-tech as the humble shopping cart. So, if Instacart can scale its smart cart to groceries nationwide, it could become one of the hottest companies around.

Between The Aisles: The Caper Cart has a few more bells and whistles than the average shopping cart, including a touchscreen and a payment terminal.

• As previously reported, the cart is equipped with cameras, sensors, and a scale so that most items can be tallied and rung up the moment you put them in the cart, so you don’t have to line up at the register.
• The carts now have a digital map that lays out the store’s floor plan and where you can find items (bye-bye, aisle numbers?).
• The company is testing a gamified feature that shows items you can grab to receive discounts corresponding to items already in your cart.
• There’s a “treasure hunt” feature showing when items go on a flash sale and the ability to import your visits so that you can keep a “shopping streak” (think Snapchat for your grocery run).

Checking Out: Instacart has been slowly rolling out the Caper Cart for a couple of years, and it’s apparently tripled the number of them out in the wild during the past six months at various large-chain supermarkets and smaller boutique locations. While selling more of these physical carts could be a big moneymaker, it’s the ability to sell ads for the touchscreen display that’ll likely keep loading up the revenue for years to come.