Why Instacart is gonna get crushed by Amazon

medium.com

3 pointsa13n1 comment

Integrate with grocery stores. Hook into an API with Safeway, Whole Foods, etc. to know exactly what they have in stock so you never let a user buy something that they don’t have. Does such a thing even exist? Would Safeway be cool with that? No idea.

This brings me back...the year was 1999 and I had an idea for a comparison shopping engine. Online was easy but I wanted to include brick and mortar stores. I went door to door around UCLA asking stores if they could provide a real-time XML feed of their inventory. Most had proprietary POS systems that didn't even connect to the internet, some had export to Excel, but you'd have to manually send it out.

I wonder how much different it is now?

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