Instacart (YC S12) launches website to complement its grocery delivery app | Hacker News Reader

Instacart (YC S12) launches website to complement its grocery delivery app

pandodaily.com

56 pointsapoorvamehta14 comments

Finally! I've had half-finished Instacart orders sitting on my phone, just because I was too lazy to pick all the items from the mobile interface and kept losing track of what I still needed (don't judge me!).

I just tried the site and ordered my weekly groceries within a few minutes. It works great and has a refreshingly small amount of cruft. Just a searchable, categorized list of items, a shopping cart and a checkout button. Good work!

First thing I noticed when I logged in is that it carried over my shopping cart from my phone. Fantastic integration, makes a lot of sense!

The iPhone app is actually why I never use this. It's too cumbersome to put together an order. It took my girlfriend and I just as long to find everything I wanted (no efficient way to browse) and put together the order as it would have taken us to just go to Safeway ourselves.

exactly why we launched the web version :)

Unrelated:

Can I instacart w/o facebook? <strike>Can I instacart w/o an iPhone? (seems to have a web interface)</strike>

I'm in Palo Alto, so I fit the first requirement on space. I also have a desire to have this service and pay them my dollars occasionally.

Edit: Just realized that I missed the point of this post.

I guess you can: https://www.instacart.com/store

That page presents me with my zip, which gets me through the first barrier, the second is "sign up with facebook"

We are going to be adding e-mail sign on shortly.

Great! Looking forward to it

Did Instacart stop with the iPhone notification SPAM?

There's no way to browse the products available without logging in. Maybe I'm missing something?

I haven't tried the service since I'm not in the coverage area but it would be nice if you could take a pic of a grocery reciept and let it automatically import an order

That's a difficult problem to solve. Nevermind the OCR issues surrounding different store's receipts, the line item descriptions are so varied and atrocious, it would be a very large undertaking to match them against Instacart's existing product database.

Good idea, just hard to execute, and I'm not sure it would have a sufficient payoff to be worth it.

Not if they did a partnership with a store to match line item data back to products.

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