Instacart & Delivery App Merchandising Brief

Example output

Delivery app merchandising brief — Marrow & Co. Bone Broth, fall soup season

Search & placement recommendations
- Confirm your product titles and category tagging are optimized for how shoppers actually search inside a delivery app — typically shorter, more literal queries than a desktop marketplace search ("bone broth," "chicken bone broth"), since delivery app search behavior skews toward fast, simple terms.
- Request category or "trending" placement for the fall soup season specifically, if the platform offers seasonal merchandising slots — bone broth is a strong fit for a soup/warming-foods seasonal placement.
- Check whether your full flavor range appears together in search results or is fragmented; a shopper searching "bone broth" should see your range as a set, not one flavor buried below a competitor.

Substitution settings (the core fix)
This is the highest-priority item in this brief. When Marrow & Co. is out of stock at a given store, the app's substitution logic is currently defaulting to a competitor product rather than another Marrow & Co. flavor. Fix in order:
1. Set flavor-to-flavor substitution priority within your own line first — if your Original flavor is out, the app should default to offering your own Chicken or Beef flavor before any competitor.
2. If your platform allows a "no substitution" or "contact customer" setting versus an automatic swap, weigh this against your out-of-stock rate — a hard "no substitute" avoids losing the sale to a competitor but risks losing the order entirely if the shopper doesn't respond in time.
3. Confirm with your account rep exactly how the platform's substitution algorithm ranks options when you have no substitution preference set — in many cases it defaults to "most similar product regardless of brand," which is very likely how you're losing sales to a competitor today.

In-app promotion slots
- Request a featured-placement or banner slot tied to the fall soup season, timed to when soup-category search volume typically rises seasonally.
- A "shop the collection" style placement grouping your full broth range performs well for a category shoppers buy multiple SKUs of at once (e.g. stocking up for soup season).
- If the platform offers a percentage-off or "buy 2" in-app coupon tied to featured placement, pair the two — a featured tile with no offer converts more slowly than one with a visible incentive.

Content & imagery checklist
- Confirm your primary tile image is legible at small mobile thumbnail size — delivery app browsing happens overwhelmingly on phones, and detailed label text often becomes unreadable at that size.
- Confirm flavor is distinguishable at a glance across your range (color-coding or clear flavor callouts on-pack), since delivery app shoppers scroll fast and rarely zoom in.
- Update product descriptions with the fall/soup-season use occasion explicitly named, not just ingredient facts.

Measurement plan
- Substitution rate: the share of your out-of-stock orders that get substituted to a competitor versus your own flavor versus no substitute — track this specifically before and after the settings fix, since it's the direct measure of whether the core problem is resolved.
- Search impression share and click-through rate for "bone broth" and flavor-specific terms during the promotion window.
- Featured-placement conversion rate, if the platform reports it separately from organic search.
- Category sell-through during the soup-season window versus the prior comparable period.

Want me to adapt this brief for a second delivery app platform, or draft the substitution-settings request to send to your account rep?