Instacart Accelerates Data Integration, Launching More Retailers Faster

Instacart is the largest online grocery marketplace in North America, with more than 85,000 store locations and over 1,500 retail partners, accounting for over 73% of U.S. digital grocery sales among third-party delivery services. As a Nexla customer since 2017, Instacart has leveraged Nexla’s data integration solutions to support a nearly 8-fold growth in its retail partnerships.

The Challenge

Instacart has seen drastic expansions in the number of key retail partnerships and the number of store locations throughout the years. The fast-paced growth substantially increased the workload of data pipeline building and maintenance for its data engineering team and required Instacart to move faster to power its platform.

The Solution

Using Nexla, Instacart was able to dramatically accelerate the retail partner onboarding and get to market faster. Nexla’s universal connector allows Instacart to automate the pipeline-building process and flow accurate product and pricing data from retail partners into Instacart’s database with ease. As a result, Instacart provides a better experience for both retailers and customers.

The Impact

• Automated data engineering to support a 748% increase in retail partners
• Reduced retailer launch time by up to two months
• 5X reduction in data engineering maintenance work
• Faster detection of data abnormalities

Integration on a Broader Scale

Founded in 2012, Instacart has been quickly growing its grocery delivery service. In the past several years Instacart enormous expansion: 748% in partnerships and 484% in market share. This growth created more work for its data engineering team, while its ambitious goals required Instacart to move faster. To power its platform, Instacart integrates with retailer APIs, FTP servers, and all manner of data sources and formats. In order to integrate with retail partners, Instacart adapts to the retailer’s data reality—sometimes standard, sometimes niche, and varies for each partner.

Instacart has robust internal systems to interface with retailers and creates tailored solutions to meet the unique needs of each retail partner. Despite that, with a steady stream of new retailers coming on board quickly, the complexity of requirements increased and created more work for the engineering team. As Instacart’s growth accelerated, the company decided to partner with Nexla to help automate the integration processes and complement existing internal systems while allowing the engineering team to focus on high-priority projects.

Speed and Quality

“We’re a fast-growing company,” said Elliot Shmukler, vice president of product at Instacart. “There’s always more work than the people available to do it, so prioritizing one-off or custom work is always a challenge.” Since every retailer’s data is different, such custom integration became a bottleneck. With Nexla’s innovative technology, Instacart complements its existing systems to support additional data sources and formats. “Nexla helps us make the integration process generic and scalable.”

Nexla’s data integration platform can connect to any data source and learn the data schemas and models, enabling users to easily automate the process of transforming data and delivering it to any destination, such as a database, data warehouse, or file. New data formats or unusual data sources are no longer gatekeepers for going to market. Engineers are happier too, as they can focus on the projects that provide the most leverage.

Summary

Instacart, powering the largest online grocery marketplace, leverages Nexla’s data integration automation to accelerate its 748% partnership expansion. As Instacart continues to advance in the online grocery sector, Nexla remains a crucial partner, supplying integration tools to support Instacart’s ongoing innovation and expansion.