Instacart’s National Reporting; New Amazon Warehouse Rules; Return to Normal

By Cleveland Admin

In our most recent research, Instacart has been called out as offering a range of good activations including search advertising, national coupons, and free shipping programs. The one downside to participating in these programs is that Instacart only reports the national results, rather than illustrating performance/results at the individual retailer level. It is believed Instacart’s retail partners will restrict them from disclosing that type of data in the future. This causes some challenges for manufacturers in terms of funding the activations. One suggestion that is becoming more common is to equally split a pool of marketing funds across the accounts, recognizing how it will benefit all of them and thus they should contribute.

Source: Facebook.com/Instacart

New Amazon Warehouse Rules:
Effective immediately, Amazon will restrict the amount of inventory 3P sellers can store in an Amazon US Fulfillment Center to prevent sellers from storing items that are less popular during busy shopping periods like Christmas, and now Prime Day (likely in Oct). Independent sellers will be able to store over three months of inventory (with limits on a product by product basis) and can replenish this inventory as items sell through. The change comes after Amazon operations were impacted by the demand spikes related to COVID-19 with many items seeing long delivery windows or being out of stock, in addition to some concern from Amazon that there may be a resurgence of the virus in the fall, triggering it to focus on essential items. 

Source: aboutamazon.com

Return to Normal:
Our research suggests consumers’ outlook on returning to normal has remained steady over the past month, with consumers continuing to be cautious. Comfort levels in dining out at a restaurant did improve, however, going to a movie theater has worsened, and shopping at an indoor mall and traveling for vacation has remained fairly consistent with the previous month.