Home Depot and Instacart’s growing collaboration will continue to expand the delivery app’s offerings beyond broccoli, baby food and frozen pizza from supermarkets. Customers using the app may see more nails, floor tile and electric saws going forward.
Home Depot announced the expansion of an existing pilot program, advancing to a nationwide partnership with Instacart. As a result, it will offer same-day delivery in as little as an hour from nearly 2,000 store locations. Now, Home Depot customers can visit Instacart online to order almost anything sold there, whether it’s an extension cord or a bag of mulch. Delivery will then be handled through Instacart’s nationwide corps of delivery drivers.
Home Depot ranks No. 4 in the Top 1000 Digital Commerce 360’s database of the largest online retailers in North America. It’s also the top-ranking retailer in the Top 1000’s Hardware & Home Improvement category.
Home Depot’s Instacart pilot expansion
“Feedback from our customers has been positive and we are excited to roll out this program nationwide,” said George Lane, a spokesman for Home Depot, who spoke to Digital Commerce 360.
Home Depot joins rival Lowes in enabling customers to have items delivered to their doorstep. Merchandise from Lowes is delivered via DoorDash. The home improvement chains join numerous retailers in partnering with what began primarily as food delivery services. Kohl’s, for instance, offers items by Instacart. So do Best Buy, Costco, Target, Walgreens and Walmart, among others.
The service also includes Instacart’s “Big & Bulky Fulfillment Solution,” which ensures same-day deliveries for heavier items up to 60 pounds. This gives Home Depot pro-customers another option when ordering outsized or heavier items crucial to their trade. Instacart and Home Depot’s partnership could be significant, especially in the pro-customer segment, according to industry observers.
Delivery’s importance for Home Depot
“The ability for a chain like Home Depot to consistently provide one-hour delivery of moderately heavy items could indeed be a game changer for many — even most — contractors,” says Jim McClellan, partner and co-founder of FORT Systems. The software company provides warehouse fulfillment and management systems and works with major carriers like UPS and FedEx.
McClellan said having bigger and bulkier items would help contractors achieve efficiency in multiple areas.
“It would, of course, ease some of the logistical planning for contractors, and potentially even lower costs for clients, as contractors would potentially not need to leave a job site to pick up needed items as often,” McClellan says.
But he also says that Home Depot benefits from the partnership by essentially creating a new B2B channel.
“It could create new revenue opportunities in a segment that functions more like a wholesale/freight forwarding channel,” McClellan says. “The critical consideration for Home Depot would be the resource allocation to a channel like this, as maintaining a high level of success for such a tight delivery window requires high levels of maintenance and planning,”
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