Instacart has already brought its online grocery delivery services to major markets with grocers including Kroger, Whole Foods, Costco and Publix. By partnering with Wegmans, however, Instacart is reaching further into unfamiliar territory: the suburbs.
The service, which will be available for shoppers of Wegmans stores in Northern Virginia and Maryland, will allow customers to order online and have their groceries delivered to them in as little as one hour.
{loadposition}This launch will mark the first time Wegmans offers same-day delivery for online shoppers, a sign that even smaller family-run chains (Wegmans only has 92 stores) are jumping on the opportunity to implement grocery delivery in their offerings.
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Wegmans customers can order through a page on its site or through the Instacart app. Deliveries on orders of more than $35 come with a $5.99 delivery fee, while deliveries under that amount are presumably charged more. Wegmans also is charging more per product through the delivery service than it does in stores.
With AmazonFresh and FreshDirect generating heavy competition and online grocery startup Shipt raising $40 million in a recent funding round, Instacart faces tough competition. With 31% of consumers saying they were likely to order groceries online in 2017, Instacart is fighting tooth and nail to take control of a market that is still largely untapped.
Instacart is in approximately 65 markets today and is on pace to expand to more than 100 markets by the end of 2017.
