Instacart-Get Grocery Delivery 12+

Hit and miss

They just changed the app and now they’ve placed the cart at the bottom. Why? It was better up on the right at the top of the screen and easier to see ? Another dumb decision, when you finish shopping and paying for your order, the cart does not show 0 anymore. The items remain in your cart, even after you receive confirmation that it’s paid! So if you need to go to another store and start shopping to schedule another delivery, you can’t do it.
Nice going, Instacart. Then there’s all the random missing items, shoppers who don’t read your instructions and bring you the wrong things, lost tomatoes that they say you got (and charge you for)… but you never got. Time wasted sitting on the phone calling Instacart customer service to explain all these things or take pictures of your smashed items or plead your case on those tomatoes you never got, etc. Add in the smashed bread and broken eggs and you get the idea. But the upside of all this is that occasionally you get a nice shopper who is good and reads your instructions and texts you as needed and delivers your stuff quickly. Hopefully not showing up with all your cold items warm because they delivered four different orders and you were the last one they delivered. So, I guess if you can handle all the bad, the benefit is,…”you” didn’t have to go to the store. We got someone else to do it for us. But it’s always hit and miss if it’s going to be a good or bad experience.

Developer Response ,

Hi there! We would love the opportunity to make things right! Please contact us @instacart via direct message (Twitter/Instagram) or private message (Facebook) so we can assist further. -Lola

Not great customer service

I’ve had Instacart for over a year and everything is great in terms of deliveries and the various stores you can choose from. No issue there. However, my account was recently locked and then deactivated while I had absolutely no idea as to why either happened. To get in contact with support you need to log in; however my account was locked so there was no way for me to reach them. I was able to find their number online and ask how to reactivate my account-they told me to fill out a form with a government ID and my payment information after which their trust safety department would be able to verify my account and unlock it. The problem is that the trust safety department has no number and they only communicate through email. The rep I spoke to didn’t want to give me the email address either and said I’d have to wait till they got back to me on the matter. Additionally when I asked why my account was locked they said they had no idea why it’s been locked and only the trust safety department can tell me. I was very frustrated by this because the trust safety department hasn’t reached out to me about my account being locked nor about it being deactivated. On top of that I had no way to reach them either to ask about this???
Overall the customer support regarding locked accounts was horrible and in the end resulted in me just completely leaving the service.

Great way to earn money but very one sided

I love shopping for Instacart. It’s a great way to make money quickly however, this app/ company is VERY customer driven. Your shopper rating determines your earning potential and it’s not fair at all. Customers can lie and say items are missing from their order or that the order is missing all together and you as a shopper receive a lowered rating. Customers can also give bad reviews and rate 1 star for things out of your control. The lower your rating the lower your earning potential. The lower your rating the more likely you are to get the batch’s NO ONE wants like the low or no tip orders. Disputing the claims don’t do anything to help even when you take your pictures and attempt to text the customer when items aren’t in stock and the customer doesn’t respond. It’s very easy to have your ratings drop and harder to get them back up. The lower your rating goes the more likely you are to have your account deactivated. Instacart needs to fix this and make it harder for the ratings to drop. Anything below a 5 star review drops the rating as well so you HAVE to get 5 stars everytime. But I guess until enough of us shoppers get on them about this it will continue to happen bc hey the demand for this huh job is high so they don’t care if they lose a shopper however many shoppers care if they lose this gig job. Anyway just wanted to give anyone out there a heads up on the inside workings of this app to make a sound judgement and be aware.