For the last decade, Amazon has claimed the title of king of the online shopping world. With the company seeing 2 billion orders from customers in the past 2014 fiscal year, they dominate the online market. While Amazon continues to announce further upgrades and innovations to their overall experience, the process of implementation and usage has been another matter, and many, smaller, smarter, and ambitious companies are hungry to accommodate customers in light of Amazon’s failures.
Putting a spin on Amazon’s concept, young millennial entrepreneur Max Mullen started Instacart in 2012 to provide customers with a simple and quick option for buying their groceries online. Mullen, who studied entrepreneurship at the University of Southern California in Los Angles, created a startup that partnered with stock grocery warehouses, and a fleet of branded vehicles to deliver the goods to customers on an order basis. In some cases, the delivery occurred within 12 minutes of the customers order! Investors quickly took notice of Max’s success, as by 2014 he received a 2 billion dollar valuation, and had already expanded to 15 major metropolitan areas.
Grocers are recognizing the power of the application as well, as customers purchase 2.5 times more product when shopping online. The software predicts similar grocery items the shopper may want, and as such has improved impulse buying for all grocery chains involved with the app. Instacart is already looking to innovate, as in April they added Petco to their retail roster. Instacart has realized that they can be so much more than just a grocery service, and is looking to the future in hopes to provide a better and quicker service than many of the larger online shopping companies.
Max Mullen showed the world that innovation doesn’t have to be an idea that nobody else has stumbled upon, on the contrary, he saw the need to improve on something that was already good, but could be made better with some slight tweaking. Just like the grocery market, there are other industries begging to be improved by the right person. Mullen defied those who said his idea would never work, and pushed through until he could claim success.