Delivery intermediaries like DoorDash, Instacart, Shipt, and Uber will see strong US grocery sales through 2025 even as their growth in the category declines.

On today's episode, we discuss Amazon's current size, how much more of the market it might swallow, and whether others could ever compete. We then talk about Best Buy's new membership program, Instacart, DoorDash, and Walmart getting into financial services, and how much in-store foot traffic has recovered in 2021. Tune in to the discussion with eMarketer analysts at Insider Intelligence Daniel Keyes and Blake Droesch.

We didn't include Instacart in our rankings of US ecommerce retailers because it's a service that facilitates sales for grocery retailers. That said, if Instacart were to be ranked, grocery sales through the platform would've placed Instacart just below Amazon in the No. 3 spot.

However, Instacart cannot be compared directly with competing retailers, as Walmart, Kroger, Target, and Albertsons are all available on Instacart, so its sales benefit both companies. Advantages:. Instacart has a dominant hold in the third-party delivery space.

Instacart had an 18% share, while popular restaurant delivery service DoorDash saw just 3% of US alcohol delivery app engagement.

Both left Facebook to join Instacart, where Everson is president and Simo is CEO. Troubling times at Facebook: Facebook’s string of high-level departures comes at one of the most embattled periods in the social media company’s history.

Grocery-specific platforms like Instacart and Kroger saw much lower response rates, while FreshDirect and other grocers’ sites registered shares in the low single digits.

Instacart, among the buzziest of the digital grocery shopping options during the pandemic, has also caught the eye of advertisers.

This popularity was likely driven by Amazon’s low prices and wide reach: With 63.4% of US households already having Prime memberships, the option was likely more appealing than other services with per-transaction fees, like Instacart. But shoppers already paying $119 a year for Prime might not respond well to an added fee.

Instacart: Some 16% of US digital buyers purchase food or beverage products via Instacart, according to our April 2021 ecommerce survey with Bizrate Insights. Overall US digital restaurant marketplace sales grew 123.8% YoY in 2020, to reach $44.94 billion. But there are costs as well.

DoorDash and Instacart plan to launch co-brands too, with issuer interest stemming from a need to diversify beyond travel, per April 2021 Wall Street Journal reporting. Issuing digital co-brands is also getting easier, as card-issuing platforms like Marqeta dive into the space.

Before the pandemic, 84% of US adults shopped for groceries in stores, but as of June 2021, that number's slipped down to 70%.

Loblaw has invested in digital capabilities for click and collect and delivery via a partnership with Instacart since 2017. Empire Company Ltd. announced further expansions of its ecommerce capabilities for 2021. After launching an online grocery service called Voilà in the summer of 2020 in partnership with the UK’s Ocado, the company saw massive uptake.

But Walmart and Instacart are the real forces to watch with their huge footprints of in-store sales data. Walmart can gather information on cross-category purchase behavior in its nearly 5,000 US retail locations, and Instacart can collect insights from its partnerships with more than 400 grocery chains across 30,000 stores in the US and Canada.

Article: Instacart accounts for 1 in 5 US grocery ecommerce sales, but its share is decreasing.