Instacart Fesses Up About Hidden Fees

Instacart, on paper, is an amazing idea. You tell the grocery delivery service what you want, and where you want to get it from, and a shopper buys the food, and delivers it. All you have to do is put it away in your pantry or refrigerator.

The downside? Instacart adds fees to the items you're purchasing. Trouble is, shoppers have not had a way of officially verifying that (unless they're as shopping savvy as your average winner on The Price Is Right). Was the fee tacked on by Instacart or the store?

Instacart has now tweaked its shopping experience to give users more information about pricing. Specifically, the service will now indicate when users are paying the exact same amount for an item that they'd otherwise pay for it at the store. It will also let users know when they're paying more and, if so, how much that markup is and who is responsible for it—Instacart or the store itself.

"One of the reasons that people use Instacart is because a lot of the prices have been the same as in the store and they can just pay a delivery fee. What we're doing is making sure that everyone is aware of which stores are like that so they can make more informed decisions themselves," Instacart CEO Apoorva Mehta said in an interview with Re/code.

Presumably, Instacart's new transparency relates to the fact that the company is focusing less on markups as a revenue-generating mechanism and more on payouts from the stores, which give Instacart a portion of sales in return for the service driving more business to said stores.

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It's also possible that Instacart faced a bit of heat from users who aren't too keen on paying extra for items—a lot extra, in some cases. While pricing differences are common to all delivery services, Instacart has typically enjoyed a reputation as having some of the more extreme ones. Whether or not that's accurate is irrelevant; hearing a particular delivery service is pricier than another can be a kiss of death, given just how many competing services there are nowadays.