“At a time when families are working exceptionally hard to stretch every grocery dollar, those tests raised concerns, leaving some people questioning the prices they see on Instacart,” the company said in a Monday blog post. “That’s not okay – especially for a company built on trust, transparency, and affordability.”
Retailers will continue to set their own prices on the delivery website and they may still offer different prices at different brick-and-mortar locations, Instacart said, but “from now on, Instacart will not support any item price testing services.”
Some customers would simply see a slightly higher price for an item, while others would see a slightly lower price. The experiment by Consumer Reports and the two progressive advocacy groups, for example, found that Instacart customers saw one of five different prices for the same dozen of Lucerne eggs from a Safeway store in Washington, D.C.: $3.99, $4.28, $4.59, $4.69, or $4.79.
Instacart had been offering the price-testing service to retailers since 2023. The company declined to say how many customers may have been affected, but it will end the service, effective immediately.
Instacart denied FTC allegations of wrongdoing and said it reached a settlement in order to move forward and focus on its business.
“Trust is earned through clarity and consistency,” Instacart said in its blog post. “Customers should never have to second-guess the prices they’re seeing.”
