Instacart Is Quietly Working With Third Parties To Outsource (Some Of) Its Deliveries

Congress Returns Next Week With A Tech-Heavy AgendaInstacart, the on-demand grocery delivery startup that is reportedly valued north of $2 billion, is growing fast in 15 markets throughout the country. As it seeks to meet that demand, it has begun experimenting with outsourcing deliveries through third-party providers, according to people familiar with the company’s plans.
Multiple sources tell TechSupport that Instacart has recently reached out to delivery and logistics startups like Postmates, Lyft and Sidecar, among others, to initiate conversations around them making deliveries on its behalf. While Instacart is interested in finding partners that can handle hundreds of deliveries per day, we’ve heard the company is not seeking to completely outsource the last-mile delivery portion of its business.
Though it’s unclear exactly which companies might have already struck a deal with Instacart, we have heard that some third parties are already making deliveries of Instacart orders. For example, one source told us NY-based Zipments is working with Instacart in New York City, while another said Sidecar is planning to start dropping off Instacart orders as well.
TechSupport obtained a copy of an email sent out to one on-demand delivery company Instacart approached as part of this effort. As part of the pitch, an Instacart rep says the company is looking to become a “valued, long-term customer,” with volume placed in the “hundreds of deliveries per day.” The email also states that Instacart is looking to pay a fixed price for deliveries that are made by partners.
This isn’t the first we’re hearing of Instacart’s plan to have third parties make deliveries for the company. Re/code’s Jason Del Rey reported in January that Instacart CEO Apoorva Mehta described a plan to experiment with outsourcing deliveries, and it would seem that plan is already well underway.
A source familiar with the effort tells us that Instacart is not looking to fully offload deliveries, and that it maintains control of the end-to-end experience through an app developed for shoppers and delivery people. All delivery directions are provided through that app, whether it’s an in-house delivery person or someone contracted through a third-party.
That means Instacart provides the routing for third-party drivers and delivery people making the final hand-off of groceries to the customer, rather than relying on a partner’s logistics infrastructure. Those delivery people are also rated by customers in the Instacart app, whether they are being paid by Instacart itself or one of its partners.
Relying on other companies for some of its deliveries isn’t the only change Instacart has made in the way it does business lately. The company, which recently raised $210 million in Series C funding, recently moved away from a revenue model that relied on a mix of markups on groceries alongside a per-delivery or annual subscription fee. Instead, Instacart has gradually moved to a model where retailers price their own inventory and instead pay the company a fee for sales that take place on the platform.
Instacart declined to comment for this story.
Featured Image: kristin sloan/Flickr UNDER A CC BY 2.0 LICENSE0
SHARES0Share0Tweet0Share0000AdvertisementAdvertisementCrunchBaseInstacartFounded2012  OverviewInstacart is a same-day grocery delivery startup offering delivery in as little as one hour. Focused on delivering groceries and home essentials, Instacart already has over 500,000 items from local stores in its catalogue. Customers can choose from a variety of local stores including Safeway, Whole Foods, Super Fresh, Harris Teeter, Shaw's, Mariano's, Jewel-Osco, Stanley's and Costco. …LocationSan Francisco, CaliforniaCategoriesGroceries, Local Businesses, E-CommerceFoundersBrandon Leonardo, Apoorva Mehta, Max MullenWebsitehttp://www.instacart.comFull profile for InstacartPostmatesFounded2012  OverviewPostmates is transforming the way local goods move around a city by enabling anyone to get any product delivered in under one hour. Postmates' revolutionary urban logistics & on-demand delivery platform connects customers with local couriers, who purchase and deliver goods from any restaurant or store in a city.Postmates is built by a passionate team of engineers, designers, operations and growth …LocationSan Francisco, CaliforniaCategoriesDelivery, Logistics, Shipping, Transportation, E-Commerce, Local, MobileFoundersBastian Lehmann, Sam Street, Sean PlaiceWebsitehttp://postmates.comFull profile for PostmatesLyftFounded2012  OverviewLyft is a peer-to-peer transportation platform that connects passengers who need rides with drivers willing to provide rides using their own personal vehicles. Lyft was started in 2012 with the mission of building a peer-to-peer transportation solution that would help make cities safer, more affordable and better connected. Lyft now operates in 68 cities across the U.S.When using Lyft, passengers …LocationSan Francisco, CaliforniaCategoriesPeer-to-Peer, Apps, Transportation, Collaborative Consumption, College Campuses, SoftwareFoundersJohn Zimmer, Logan GreenWebsitehttp://lyft.comFull profile for LyftSidecarFounded2010  OverviewSidecar is the industry's leading programmatic e-commerce marketing technology. Sidecar delivers customer acquisition, conversion and retention through industry leading automation for online retailers. Fueled by product intelligence, Sidecar leverages data about the e-commerce site, catalog, products, users and the competition to power predictive decision making for Paid Search, Google Product …LocationPhiladelphia, PennsylvaniaCategoriesGoogle Apps, Comparison Shopping, Email, Search, Automotive, SaaS, Internet Marketing, E-CommerceWebsitehttp://www.getsidecar.comFull profile for SidecarZipmentsFounded2010  Overviewzipments is a local logistics platform providing businesses and individuals with the fastest, most affordable same day delivery service available.zipments customers can request local deliveries through www.zipments.com, the zipments mobile app or through a variety of online retailers who have integrated the zipments API with their online shopping carts.zipments serves a variety of sectors including …LocationNew York, New YorkCategoriesLogistics, Postal and Courier Services, E-Commerce, Retail, Mobile, Enterprise SoftwareFoundersGarrick Pohl, Travis Brack, Elliot Nelson.

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Yik Yak Quietly Dropped From Google Play Charts In October

Posted 12 hours ago by Sarah Perez (@sarahintampa)0
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If the rise of anonymous apps has proven anything, it’s that humans can be ugly creatures when the social pressures that keep our baser natures in check are removed, and we’re allowed to share our darker sentiments and thoughts – sometimes, for nothing more than the cheap thrill of knowing they’ve caused others outrage. Case in point: Yik Yak, the latest app to take advantage of the powerful draw of anonymous postings as a means to quick growth – but whose “wild west” atmosphere has led to the app being banned on several college campuses around the U.S. in recent months.

It appears, however, that colleges aren’t the only ones that have an issue with Yik Yak. The app, as it turns out, has been delisted on Google Play since October 2014. That means that Android users can only surface the app via search, not by spotting it in the store’s top charts.

Before the apparent delisting on Google Play, Yik Yak was ranked #13 in the “Social” category on Google’s Android app store, and a decent enough #149 Overall.

The following day, the app was just gone from the charts entirely. It was unranked. (See below)

A chart from App Annie shows this event, and we’ve confirmed with the company the data is accurate. For an app to disappear from App Annie’s rankings, it has to be ranked lower than #1,500. It’s unheard of for a popular social app like Yik Yak to go from riding the top of the app store to dropping off like this without some sort of intervention.

Google Involved In Yik Yak’s Delisting

While a mobile developer is able to delist their own app, that would make the app unavailable via search, too. For Yik Yak to be discoverable by search, as it currently is, that means Google had to be involved in its delisting.

Possibly, Google took this action due to Yik Yak’s violation of Google’s “hate speech” clause in its developer guidelines. According to Google’s “Developer Program Policies,” the company doesn’t allow content “advocating against groups of people based on their race or ethnic origin, religion, disability, gender, age, veteran status, or sexual orientation/gender identity.”

So why is the app live at all, given this rule? Perhaps because Google doesn’t want to go so far as to remove the popular application from its store – especially since Apple hasn’t done the same, despite often having stricter policies. (Neither Google nor Yik Yak would comment.).

Yik Yak, we should note, has declined some on iOS – it sharply dropped in its Overall rankings since last fall where it had maintained a steady position in the top 10 or 20 or sometimes 30. GigaOm also previously noted this decline occurred shortly after its funding.

But Yik Yak is still listed as #20 in Social and #162 Overall, as of yesterday. That means that Apple hasn’t delisted the app on its store, and may be, in part, the reason for Google’s hesitation to ban Yik Yak outright. Or Google could be waiting to see if Yik Yak’s new tools for moderating its content begin to work at some point.

College Bans Leading To Yik Yak’s Decline?

Yik Yak’s story and the controversies surrounding its content is not a new one.

The app, like Ask.fm before it, and in the web’s earlier days, MySpace, has been pointed to as a source of online bullying and harassment. The results of such bullying can have devastating consequences in younger users, as Ask.fm found out when its largely middle-to-high school audience became afflicted by a fairly significant number of teen suicides.

To its credit, Yik Yak attempted to stem the usage of its app by this younger demographic, even proactively implementing geofences to block the app on school campuses around the U.S. last spring. Its reasoning? Yik Yak was meant for adults, and the misuse by kids had besmirched its reputation with parents, teachers and other officials, leading schools to ban the app at a number of locations around the country.

Unfortunately, it turns out that “adults” aren’t much better when it comes to keeping it civilized while hiding behind anonymous accounts.

The app more recently has been banned at a growing number of college campuses, including Eastern Michigan, Utica College in New York, Vermont’s Norwich University, and others. Elsewhere, universities are dealing with calls to ban the app from their student populations, and are now choosing how to respond.

In some cases, Yik Yak has been used to issue threats of mass violence, like at University of North Carolina, Michigan State University, University of Georgia, Towson University, and Penn State.

And an even larger number of schools are dealing with controversies related to hate speech and other offensive “yaks” on the service, including one where a poster threatened gang rape. Schools including Clemson, Emory, Colgate, the University of Texas, Kenyon College, and Miami University have been asked by students to ban Yik Yak, though in many cases, the universities have not acted on those requests.

In other cases, schools are aware of the abuses taking place, but are choosing not to take action. For example, Duke, has said it will not ban Yik Yak, as it “does not support censorship of any kind.

In Duke’s student-run publication The Chronicle, Dean of Students Sue Wasiolek explained that the university can’t really do anything to prevent harmful content from being spread on forums like Yik Yak, because as soon as one is shut down, another pops up in its place.

The university has dealt with this problem in the past, when a former Duke student created online gossip forum JuicyCampus. Another forum, CollegiateACB later took its place after JuicyCampus was shut down due to cyberbullying, and then it, too, was closed in 2014 following negative media attention, the paper noted. (JuicyCampus founder Matt Ivester recently told The NYT that when JuicyCampus was booming the world didn’t know the term “cyberbullying,” but the Yik Yak guys “should know better” by now.)

In addition the campus controversies, there are also petitions being organized online asking Google and Apple to remove the app from their respective app stores, calling the app “a gateway” that allows people to be cruel to one another.

While there are those who may argue that banning the app is an affront to free speech, it’s not quite that simple. Some of the content on the app is harmful, and not protected by the First Amendment, but other content is just silly, fun, or even useful. A blanket ban that censors the entire app, then, is overkill.

At Yik Yak, the company reports having filtering mechanisms in place and a round-the-clock team of moderators who review posts, so it’s not as if they’re unaware of the problems the app faces. It’s just, perhaps, that these systems are not good enough or fast enough yet, to review posts from the app’s millions of users.

Given how long Yik Yak has been unranked on Google Play, it’s unclear if or when it will return to the app store’s charts. It’s also unclear to what extent that will affect the app’s longer term growth – after all, the app has largely grown through word-of-mouth referrals, meaning college students and others are seeking it out, not just happening upon it.

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SHARES0Share0Tweet0Share0000AdvertisementAdvertisementCrunchBaseYik YakFounded2013  OverviewYik Yak acts like a local bulletin board for your area by showing the most recent posts from other users around you. It allows anyone to connect and share information with others without having to know them.News, funny experiences, shout outs, and jokes spread faster than ever through Yik Yak’s tight-knit community.Create quality content and receive upvotes from other members of your community. …LocationAtlanta, GeorgiaCategoriesApps, Identity, Local, Social MediaFoundersBrooks Buffington, Tyler DrollWebsitehttp://yikyakapp.comFull profile for Yik Yak NewslettersTechCrunch Daily Top headlines, delivered dailyTC Week-in-Review Most popular stories, delivered SundaysCrunchBase Daily Latest startup fundings, delivered dailyEnter AddressSubscribeRelated VideosPlay VideoYik Yak, VC Investments Outside Tech And Scanadu’s Scientific Breakthroughs11:41Play VideoYik Yak | Fastest Rising Startup BackstagePlay VideoBitcoin World Proves It’s Not All Hardware at CESMore Related Videosrankingbans AppsYik YakAppsPopular PostsUp NextTry These Interactive Demos Of Apple Watch Apps Featured At Apple’s EventsPosted 12 hours ago CrunchBoardJob ListingsEnterprise Database ManagerFoundation CenterProgrammerFoundation CenterManager/Director of User Growth Figure 1Software Engineer, Search Engine OptimizationPayScaleProgram Manager, Search Engine OptimizationPayscaleMore from CrunchBoardAdvertisementTechCrunchNewsTCTVEventsCrunchBaseAboutStaffContact UsAdvertise With UsSend Us A TipInternationalChinaEuropeJapanFollow TechCrunchFacebookTwitterGoogle+LinkedInYoutubePinterestTumblrInstagramStumbleUponFeedTechCrunch AppsiOSAndroidWindows 8Subscribe to TechCrunch DailyLatest headlines delivered to you daily

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