Wed, 17 Sep 2014
Stephen Klein, a biz dev guy from
Instacart, emailed me to ask why I hadn't tried it yet. Here's my response:
Hi Stephen,
I was excited to learn about Instacart offering deliveries from
Costco. Unfortunately, your current pricing model makes deciding
whether to use Instacart too expensive. It's not that your prices are
too high. It's that I don't know if your prices are too high; that
is, the cost of information is too high.
When deciding whether to use Instacart, my decision is between going
to Costco or having Instacart go to Costco for me. In most cases, I
would prefer to have Instacart go for me. (Sometimes, I might want to
browse.) But to make the decision, I need to know how much it would
cost me to use Instacart.
The current pricing model is not transparent enough to determine this
cost. Your prices are not the same prices as those offered as Costco,
so I don't know what the total cost of using Instacart is, and rather
than spend the time trying to figure it out, I simply don't use
Instacart.
My recommendation would be to change your pricing model to make
explicit the cost of using Instacart. You could charge a fixed
percentage above the Costco price, charge a higher delivery fee,
or charge a per-item delivery fee, for example; whatever model would
be both transparent and profitable.
Christian
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