Becoming an Instacart Shopper

Are you considering becoming an Instacart Shopper? 

With the holidays approaching and a little extra time available, I thought I'd give Insta Cart a whirl. I wanted to add more structure to my day during the slower season of real estate and the extra cash couldn't hurt either. Self employment for some is often like this. The highs, lows and in-betweens are about setting up healthy practices and staying busy no matter what. If I could earn $500-$700 a week doing Insta Cart part time, I would stay busy and also supplement my income. 

My profile page on the Instacart App.

So how much money can I make during a week with instacart? 

Keep in mind that my experience is just that, mine. Based on 90 days of shopping the amount of earnings potential changes from day to day and is also impacted by your location and the types of stores you choose to shop. I live in Richfield Mn and so I am pretty much lodged in a very high concentration of stores and people. 

In the 16 weeks I have been working with Instacart my total receipts is $7646. That averages out to $477 per week working on the Instacart app. My original goal was 500-700 a week, so I am not making as much as I had hoped working part time, but when I go actually look at the time spent per week its pretty nominal at 15-20 hours per week. 

My best weeks were around the holidays, with 3 weeks over 700$ working part time, I have had a handful of weeks under $300 which represents little to no effort. This does not include my operating expenses, mainly gas and deprecation on my vehicle. 

Keeping track of your income and expenses is the shoppers responsibility.  

Instacart does offer some good accounting information, but I've found it is built around end users shopping from home and never even considers the person doing the shopping and when it does it chooses not to share better data with you and even track it, Which makes way more sense.  SO what do they offer? 

Instead they only count the time from when you "start shopping' At the store, until you drop off the goods. From that point, until you get to the next "start shopping" you are not getting paid or compensation, for gas or time. 

If you end up in Farmington Minnesota, for a delivery and then accept another order in Eden Prairie guess what, you're on the hook for that. Other than Instacart making sure you have enough time to complete the batch, from there to the store you are on your own and once you take that next batch your next delivery’s cost includes this in your overall costs that don't get tracked.  

They could easily add a function to log those miles for you with Pins, drop them on forms and have a simple printout for you. You could opt in. But then you would take account of this time and that works against your income and you realize pretty quickly you're losing money, faster than you're making it and it's clearly not something instacart wants to share or help you with.

Who should consider becoming a shopper?

I approached being an Insta Cart shopper as a fun experiment and an opportunity to understand the algorithm as so many websites and apps of today are all tied to the an algorithm.  I wanted to not only stay busy but also enjoy my day, so I didn't want to treat it as a JOB. 

Winter in Minnesota is a cold dark place. It's hard to stay busy and stay connected with other humans when you work from home. Having something push me out into the world that is completely different from my career helps me not get stir crazy,  I genuinely enjoy meeting new people, engaging with them and using my brain in new ways. 

That being said this is no easy Gig, many times I have felt completely overwhelmed. Not being able to finds items drives me Banana's and this can be complicated if the item you are looking for is not in stock. Standing in an aisle trying to find something that doesn't exist with 30-50 items to go can make the world feel like its spinning and Instacart is not going to help, actually reaching out to Instacart makes the process even more infuriating. 

Tips for new shoppers just getting started 

I have my preferred grocery stores I consistently go to. With Insta Cart I began shopping at stores I'd never been to and looking for items I'd never heard of. Try to imagine you are looking for tortilla strips for a salad.  Where do you look for those? In the chip aisle by tortilla chips? Are they located by the salad dressing? Nope. In the produce section. There were many items that were difficult to find and there was added stress because each shopping trip is timed. By treating Insta Cart as a game, it made it fun and less frustrating. 

But let's dive into the numbers and facts of being an Insta Cart Shopper.  The most I have made daily from Insta cart was $240 and it felt like the longest day of my life. The hardest part was the stress of a new app and a foreign shopping experience. Customers shopping carts were unfamiliar to me and it was difficult finding items outside my wheelhouse. It was a lot of information to keep track of quickly and it made my brain hurt!

Getting past the first 50 orders is critical to getting more better paying orders, but new unfamiliar stores may have you ready to try out a suicide vest, so sticking to stores where you normally shop can be a good strategy.  

Tracking the numbers and combining them with instacart can help set up a baseline income 

Although I kept a written log with notes throughout the day, it was difficult to calculate the total time spent in each category. These are the categories I came up with to analyze where most of my time was spent.

1. Online - Ready

2. En-route to store

3. Shopping 

4. Checking out 

5. Loading your car 

6. Heading to the destination 

7. Arriving 

8. Unpacking, delivering

9. Customer Service 

10. Keeping track of it all

     See my next blog to learn more about my analyzation of the process. 

The biggest expense you have to consider is gas and vehicle deprecation and keeping notes of mileage is critical

This part is going to run long but there is lots to cover and can be useful information for anybody who is self employed or interested in their vehicle deprecation.

How many miles can you get on a gallon of gas? 

For this we need to find the fuel fraction, how much gas. How far. etc.  and so we need some baseline measurements. Which we can collect, and document. My dad loved doing this, btw. he had little notes. He would get pissed if I didn’t do the miles and fuel, obviously because I took my own measurements and found my fuel efficiency was 70% of his. 

For this I recommend buying some graph paper. I grabbed a 3 ring binder at goodwill and a 50 sheet tablet at office max and I think I was all in 10-12$ and it gave me a place to store some other relevant documents. 

Now go fill up your vehicle, let it stop once (the gas pump) Write down all 3 data points in your logbook. Cost, total gallons and unit cost. If you have a trip odometer reset it, log the miles currently on the vehicle You can add locale, date and such all kinds of added things that can have all kinds of meaningful shit. 

There are a ton of factors that impact efficiency, highway. city all this has meaning. But so does your use of the petal and brakes. If you hop on the freeway, drive 30 miles at 55 mph and refill you might get Really amazing Numbers.  This type of information can be helpful in a fuel fraction, at a later time. First you need to start observing actual or anticipated types of scenarios. 

Keep in mind environmental factors play a huge role in fuel efficiency, heavy snow and 4 wheel drive sucks gasoline. So does air compression for AC units on hot days, you're nice and cool in the cabin and the engine is pounding energy into the belt drive, for cooling. Lots of idling time can play into this as well, so whatever you do keep track of this if it's volatile, dig a little deeper. 

Drive and drive. IF you're doing Instacart (or any time of fuel fraction analysis) already, start adding in data from your process. I kept track of the start shopping feature. For shopping this can be huge to have this data to understand blindspots. I wrote down the start time at the store, the out time of the store and the finally delivered mile. Then start over again at the next store. If I end a day or switch roles for a bit, Note the time you get back to doing what you actually want to do. Make a note of the time and mileage. 

There is no fixed point that's required, it is an analysis over time and if you run a business you'll need these notes to claim the Mileage as a deductible expense.  But the more miles you get the better your data will get, to start with if you are doing instacart exclusively for a day, start and end the day at the fuel pump. This one thing can help you figure out Real time (daily) fuel fraction to income. Not including depreciation on the vehicle and fixed costs related to it. 

The formula is pretty simple: take the Total miles driven in the trip odometer and refuel. Take the total miles driven and divide by the total gallons, replaced in the tank. If this is time spent earning money on instacart, in my fill when you start an example. Take your driving notes and get your total income during that time period and then Deduct your fuel expenses, you now have the first data point in figuring out what's possible with Instacart. 

My fuel fraction when looking at batches includes this information, when you preview a batch you'll notice that some data is missing, like estimated total time. Or Total mileage. I know for example using my fuel fraction that I average about .27 cents per mile on fuel costs for simplicity’s sake I round it up to .30 but you could go higher, but that depends on the total depreciation on your vehicle per mile and your fixed costs. Which is the next step in calculating how much you can make on Instacart. 

Figuring out vehicle depreciation costs when calculating instacart income. 

Instacart Shoppers are 1099-Misc. Income. In small business parlay we call it 10099-Ed in our best CB radio truck stop voice. This means 100% you need to report it to the IRS as Income (Instacart will as required by law.)

Deprecation means 2 things in this case for 10099ER's, the total depreciation allowed for tax purposes and the "actual depreciation costs." I am not a tax professional, or accountant. Always seek advice and counsel with the appropriate professional if you have questions. 

This summer I Purchased a 2009 Chevrolet Suburban 2500. The Total cost was $5,700 and it's a plain white suburban from excel energies vehicle program with 200k miles on it. I bought it as a business use vehicle as 3/4 ton trucks are expensive and in short supply. 

The 2500 series truck is built and designed for 500k Miles and with proper maintenance can easily exceed that getting up to a million miles. Keep this declining schedule in mind when figuring this out. 

For my truck purchase at $5,700 and an estimated mileage remaining at 300k you can see the cost is almost null. But let's say I put a 100k miles on it doing instacart my cost is $1,900 a year, but this also assumes the vehicle will be worth zero at the end and that's not the case it 300k it's still worth 5k, to the right buyer. That's because I bought this vehicle at the optimal depreciation curve. 

IF this is a brand new car with 20k miles and you paid 30k for it and you drive 100k this year, you're going to see a significant decline in value. Maybe up to 10k in this scenario depending on the current condition and market. This number does not include the entropy costs associated with use and the more expensive the vehicle, the higher the costs. I say around 2k a year is the baseline entropy of a vehicle, under normal use that is cash you are going to spend repairing and doing maintenance on the vehicle.  

2k may be high, but it's a safe number, if you're not spending that much and getting lots of miles, you're sapping future repairs for current use and eventually it will catch up. This includes things like oil changes, tires, filters, parts. All these things are wearing down with every use to their eventual failure. 

The goal of this is coming up with a fairly accurate cost per mile that takes all this into consideration. 

Final thoughts on becoming an instacart shopper

Depending on how you approach this it can be a full time job, part time gig or just a way to make an extra hundred dollars a week. There is lots of Do's and Dont's almost to many to cover on one blog post, if you are considering instacart use my Referral code and I will be happy to help guide you through the process and get you up and running on day one.

Use the referral code when you install the app!   

Thanks for checking out todays, blog post! Have a great day and see you back soon! 

Find your homes value!