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Instacart shoppers besieged by bots that snatch lucrative orders

189 points by wallflower 6y ago

ultimoo 6y ago
I had come across a video couple of months ago showing this in action. Captcha was mentioned a few times on the thread. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nwCh4rtAOWc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nwCh4rtAOWc
- gruez 6y ago
  I love how the kneejerk reaction to any bot problem is "captchas". I'm not sure how that would even help. If there are 20 jobs available, and 3 of them are high paying, having a bot sort through the list for you still gives you an advantage. Sure, it's better than having someone claim all 3 of them at the same time, but you can achive the same effect by having a cooldown of 5 seconds (enforced server side). Also, with a cooldown, you can't get an advantage (eg. entering a captcha faster with keyboard)
fosk 6y ago
Any system - or market - sophisticated enough will see the emergence of bots as the ultimate decision makers/arbitration players. It’s quite fascinating.
- chii 6y ago
  the problem stems from the fact that instacart is not doing a proper 'auction' of the orders to all participants. if the instacart platform allows all deliverers to bid on a task (where each deliverer bids their % take of the order), and the lowest % take wins the bid, then this will give everyone a fair chance at taking all jobs.
- 082349872349872 6y ago
  My groceries are delivered by employees (either of the chain or of the postal service, and on rare occasions, of DPD). No need to hate the player when one simply avoids the precariat game.
mitchbob 6y ago
Article also at https://www.seattletimes.com/business/instacart-shoppers-besieged-by-bots-that-snatch-lucrative-orders/ https://www.seattletimes.com/business/instacart-shoppers-bes...
- dang 6y ago
  Ok, we'll change to that from https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-07-31/instacart-shoppers-besieged-by-bots-that-snatch-lucrative-orders https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-07-31/instacart... on the assumption that more people can read it. Thanks!
Johnny555 6y ago
Maybe the best strategy is to tip low when placing the order, then increase the tip after delivery to reward the guy who needed the money enough to take your order with a low tip.
- gruez 6y ago
  why not just tip them in cash?
  - troydavis 6y ago
    Many or most deliveries are contactless: https://news.instacart.com/introducing-leave-at-my-door-delivery-new-doorstep-delivery-service-now-available-across-north-f06f9e3bd346 https://news.instacart.com/introducing-leave-at-my-door-deli...
    - derwiki 6y ago
      I doubt an Instacart contractor would turn down a cash tip. Pre-COVID, I exclusively tipped Lyft drivers cash. Yes I had to keep small bills around. Ended up not being a big deal.
    - dylan604 6y ago
      Taping an envelope to your door clearly visible for the delivery person would still remain contactless. If the envelope is still there when you pick up your items, then no harm in trying
      - Johnny555 6y ago
        And if it's not, then you'll wonder if it went to the Instacart driver or the UPS guy. (well, not my UPS guy, he's actually a she, and she gives my dogs treats when she sees him)
        dylan604 6y ago
        You kind of know if you have deliveries coming to your house, right? You get to schedule your Insta deliveries, so just don't make your Insta deliver 10:30am, 3pm, or 9pm. Should avoid the UPS delivery
WWLink 6y ago
This strikes me as unethical.
- missedthecue 6y ago
  What is unethical to you? Is it the competition that is bad or is using technology to compete the bad thing?
function_seven 6y ago
I'm going to go out on a limb and guess that this is only possible on Android, right? The video linked by ultimoo shows an Android, and my perception is that iOS sandboxing is much tighter. How can Instacart combat this? They can't require iOS among their shoppers. Is it going to be an arms race of heuristics and anti-cheat code like it is for games that want to prevent aim-bots? Or they could start running their own algorithm on the back-end, release juicy batches first to shoppers that haven't gotten a good one recently.
- rtsil 6y ago
  They can add any sort of captcha challenge or publish fake juicy shopping orders as honeypot, since the bots will instantly grab them. Of course, the next step will be to pay a sweatshop in a poor country to contantly monitor and grab the offers. There's no end to human greed, as evidenced by the Uber Eats couriers outsourcing to undocumented migrants at pennies on the dollar (or the euro) in France.
  - botwriter 6y ago
    funny you say that I think the same thing is happening in the UK with these fast food delivery apps they all seem to be Eritrean.
- tptacek 6y ago
  Smaller teams than Instacart have put up effective fights against cheating. It's an arms race, but so what? The goal is to make cheating uneconomical, not impossible.
  - function_seven 6y ago
    There's always some cost to having to implement countermeasures. In games, I've seen seen poorly-implemented anti-cheat software kick or ban legitimate players from their games. A sibling comment mentioned captchas. That would suck for legitimate Instacart shoppers. Imagine frantically looking for each photo that has a stop sign in it, knowing that the orders you're trying to claim could be snatched up by someone who's a faster captcha solver. Somehow there's always a cost when bots start to wage war against other bots. Sure, they can figure out how to minimize it for the human, while making it uneconomical for the bots to exist. I guess I'm just curious how they're going to do that. Because I can already see the blog post now: "Instacart Banned Me for No Reason"
gruez 6y ago
Is there a reason why instacart even allows you to pick orders? It seems like this exploit can be stopped just by only letting shoppers look at the first few items of the queue, and limiting the amount of skips.
- mnm1 6y ago
  That could be construed as Instacart assigning orders to their shoppers which would likely make them employees eligible for benefits, something they want to avoid at all costs. This may already be the case in CA regardless of what they do, but they definitely want to avoid paying any benefits for their workers in any state where this is not yet currently the case.
  - chefandy 6y ago
    Definitely this. They don't care who gets the orders as long as they're gotten, and assigning the work to people rather than letting people pick from a pool makes them look more like an employer/dispatcher rather than a broker.
  - slfnflctd 6y ago
    > construed as Instacart assigning orders to their shoppers Uber & Lyft assign rides to drivers. [You can still cancel them after they ping you, but it's discouraged.] It seems to me like it works extremely well overall compared to what Instacart is doing.
- Fogest 6y ago
  Grocery shopping is a bit different from just picking up a food order. You may only have the time (or desire) to do smaller orders and not want to deal with larger more time consuming ones. Or maybe you don't want to drive farther to certain stores etc....
  - dragonwriter 6y ago
    Sure, but all of those could be addressed by allowing setting available-for criteria rather than browse-and-select. Or they could just not display tips in advance; since tips can be altered after delivery, it's misleading to treat them as part of the bargain of accepting a delivery anyway, advance entry should be viewed as a convenience for the orderer to enter a default amount based one expected service, not an inducement. If the tips aren't visible in advance, bots can't snatch “lucrative” orders, because they can't find them.
neonate 6y ago
https://archive.is/2TgtR https://archive.is/2TgtR
rayhendricks 6y ago
Wow saw that video, maybe someone got into their API? What if someone from a non-USA location started selling access to the best batches in prime USA locations e.g. SF/LA/SEA/NYC/DC then we could start trading and packaging up those batches and trading on them in crypto exchanges, maybe even make a new coin? Also having someone put in a SSN is not any kind of verification if you’re trying to subcontract out to people not in the country legally/documented. The ssn algorithm is known and it is easy to generate, it just don’t get fixed because politics. Maybe we have finally found a decent use for eth?
- gruez 6y ago
  >e.g. SF/LA/SEA/NYC/DC then we could start trading and packaging up those batches and trading on them in crypto exchanges, maybe even make a new coin? In that case you might as well make claiming orders be based on a dutch auction system.
  - arcticbull 6y ago
    And without ETH. Just with, you know, a server. With a dutch auction.
mkatx 6y ago
Reminds me of working at amazon doing prime deliveries and using an Android app where you can create flow charts to automate grabbing hours. The difference is amazon at the time didn't care. We even reported what we were doing as a bug, and recommended a queue system instead, yet we only got automated responses not mentioning the issue at all. This automation included an annoying screen refresh, where you hit back and then reenter to see if the button is lit up to get hours. I remember feeling terrible sitting in the warehouse waiting for an order and seeing others clicking back and forth as fast as they can the entire time, all while my phone was silently, with the screen disabled, 'scanning' for hours. I think they consider the warehouse drivers like what I used to do temporary, till they get their drone fleets up. Regarding instacart, and these systems in general, a queue system is just the most fair option. Your take home pay shouldn't be reduced to how well you can click a touch screen or whether you happen to be aware of app automation. It doesn't even seem to benefit the platform itself, just degrade the experience of the driver's.
- CydeWeys 6y ago
  Fyi, the word is "queue".
  - mkatx 6y ago
    Haha, your right.
    - nezgar 6y ago
      you're
- aphextron 6y ago
  >I think they consider the warehouse drivers like what I used to do temporary, till they get their drone fleets up. Why even bother with drones when you can pay a person $8/HR with zero benefits thanks to collusion with lawmakers to bust unions and stall the minimum wage?
  - 6y ago
benatkin 6y ago
.app is great for giving official-sounding domain names to scammers. Way to go, Google. Eventually more .app domains will be squatted, the price will go up, and companies will buy domains proactively (like instashopper.app - instashopper is obvious shorthand for Instacart Shopper, the official term) but not before a lot of unethical enterprises take advantage of it.
sneak 6y ago
The bots aren’t snatching the orders. Other shoppers, competing for the same business, are using software programs to compete more effectively and efficiently. This is not an exploit. Access to deal flow is first-come, first-served.
meritt 6y ago
No clue what Instacart shoppers do. What makes the orders lucrative/better? Is it high dollar orders, or multiple orders at the same grocery store, or is the tip pre-published, or what's the criteria when looking for orders to fulfill?
- pishpash 6y ago
  Lucrative orders are mispriced orders, no ifs and buts. That's how efficient markets work.
  - erik_seaberg 6y ago
    Instacart customers should be paying more for long trips and bulky items and short deadlines. Clarke once observed that “In orbit, caviar is cheaper than bread.” Paying them more for valuable items only makes sense if the service includes preventing heists.
- smt88 6y ago
  I don't know the exact formula, but they get tipped on the price of the order (like a server at a US restaurant would). Instacart customers are charged a flat delivery fee, so multiple orders also seems like a factor.
- behnamoh 6y ago
  I think it means orders which will result in higher tips.
JumpCrisscross 6y ago
> some shoppers are paying software developers who have created bots — in the form of third-party apps — that run alongside the legitimate Instacart app and claim the best orders for clients Instacart is a real-time market. In real-time markets reaction time is paramount. "Cranking up pressure against app makers and banning violators when they find them" is swimming up a waterfall. The solution is in the market structure. Fundamentally, Instacart needs to shift to batch processing. This could take several forms. They could, on order submission, open a 60-second auction window. The best qualifying bid wins. Bids, mind you, could come in dollars or time to delivery or something else. Alternatively, shoppers could set orders parameters within which they guarantee acceptance. Orders could then be randomly assigned to online shoppers, perhaps with a bias towards ratings and other metrics. Either way, a real-time market, where the first shopper to accept an order, seems under-optimised. > cost of the third-party apps ranges from $250 to $600 in cryptocurrency or bank deposits Instagram should acquire the differentiated apps and integrate them into its routing. Showing every order to every shopper is inefficient. Some of these bots will just click on every order every shopper would find attractive. Those are zero sum. But some, I assume, help shoppers pick orders uniquely suited to them. Those are positive sum, and worth integrating into Instacart per se. Fascinating stuff, nevertheless.
- fossuser 6y ago
  I'd be surprised if Instacart could pull this off, their app is one of the worst pieces of software I use on a regular basis. Really confusing UX, simple things like looking up previous orders are several clicks and popups away. It's extremely, painfully slow (page loads take seconds and refresh often, I have a gigabit connection). Want to add things you always buy? It'll show you things you often buy in a weird side scroll thing. Pop ups of sales and extra things, confusing calls to attention everywhere. Click that option to add what you've previously ordered? Hopefully you haven't already added some stuff because it's not smart about adding things, it'll just increment everything already in your cart that was also in your previous order. Group cart where you have express? Make sure you're the one to click order, if a roommate does you won't get the free delivery. Lots of extra fees, order soda? heavy order fee, get alcohol? extra alcohol fee. I've gotten used to it, but it's not a great experience.
balozi 6y ago
Instacart could wipe away this feature in one afternoon if they wanted.
malwarebytess 6y ago
When I was in college 10 years ago I did Amazon's Mechanical Turk to pay my way through. One of the things I did to make my life less miserable was to automate a lot of the searching, sifting, and grabbing of jobs (hits.) Bot would only accept jobs that fit my specified time/money ratio, or known hits that paid well and predictably. Having the experience of using these "gig" side jobs I don't think there's anything wrong with people automating them to make the work less miserable and more lucrative. Frankly, anything but the best paying jobs cost more to do per hour than a federal minimum wage job. Thanks to automation I made around $16/hour (and I also had to pay taxes on that so it wasn't even that good!) Don't hate the player, hate the game. And the game here is cutthroat and designed to exploit 1099 workers for below market labor cost.
- tesmar2 6y ago
  If there was an alternative, higher wage they would pick that. This is the market labor cost.
  - redis_mlc 6y ago
    > If there was an alternative, higher wage they would pick that. This is the market labor cost. Cue the obligatory pedantic HN Econ 101 analysis. Actually, most interviews with Turks say the payment is less important than being able to do hits between classes, or without any commuting. Also, some workloads are done on Turk as carefully planned statistical trials, which cannot easily be done offline. So, nothing to do with HN Econ 101 today. Class is out.
  - MichaelGlass 6y ago
    "below market" because Instacart (and uber, etc) forgo normal labor law, have by-default but not by-contract full-time workers without any full-time benefits. Companies can achieve great benefit by externalizing cost on society, but should they? (And should they be able to?) e.g. https://www.forbes.com/sites/ebauer/2019/12/16/is-uber-cheating-on-social-securityfica-taxes/#5289694a3ce4 https://www.forbes.com/sites/ebauer/2019/12/16/is-uber-cheat... https://www.forbes.com/sites/clareoconnor/2014/04/15/report-walmart-workers-cost-taxpayers-6-2-billion-in-public-assistance/#4e9896de720b https://www.forbes.com/sites/clareoconnor/2014/04/15/report-...
MarkMarine 6y ago
The last paragraph of this is heartbreaking.
29athrowaway 6y ago
I stopped using Instacart years ago. My reasons were: 1) Shoppers would ring your phone for less than a second, ghost you and then show up with random replacements you never approved. 2) They would fail to deliver on time, then unilaterally reschedule a delivery for another time when I was not even going to be home. 3) Amazon Fresh and Prime Now are far superior services. Amazon Fresh has gotten slightly worse in the last couple of years, but it is still far better than Instacart. Has the service improved lately? Should I use Instacart in 2020?
ralmidani 6y ago
I’m a software developer who has been enthusiastic about technology pretty much my entire life, but lately I’ve started doubting that our current technological advances are even a net positive for humanity. Reading about things like this (and also about online ads, robocalls, tracking, spyware, ransomware, extortionware, massive environment-ravaging crypto-mining ops, state surveillance, “predictive policing”, fake news, state-coordinated FUD campaigns, etc.) makes me want to give it all up and live out what remains of my life in subsistence on a primitive farm.
- 1596603709 6y ago
  Then, you will learn about the plight of the farmers. Really, checkout "Super Size Me 2". I don't think there is any industry where its all gravy. Each industry has its own problems, you can only do your best to contribute in its positive growth. Don't be too hard on yourself. Also, you aren't Ghandi (or insert XYZ person here), don't put too much weight on your shoulders. FWIW none of us really matter, this is a symptom of how North American companies operate. Survival of the fittest. I went through deep depression for similar reasons, so hoping some tough love helps you.
  - mikro2nd 6y ago
    I suspect you're conflating/confusing subsistence farming with industrial "farming". As someone who has lived a "subsistence" lifestyle for a long time, now (decades) one can live really quite well on a "sub-poverty-level income" simply because you're quite decoupled from conventional-money economies. I've heard it called "abundance poverty" (not "abundant poverty", to be sure! :) ) It's worth a disclaimer, though: I practise this subsistence (aka "self-sufficiency") living outside the USA. USmmv.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
galkk 6y ago
> When Marsh opens her Instacart shopping app, she sees promising orders disappear before she can act. “No human can click that fast,” she said. “Instacart needs to fix this. These bots are literally taking the food off my kids’ table.” While I understand the wish to get the best/any batch, this is significant exaggeration. If your kids food depends on getting the batches from the website, then you have much larger problem than bots.
- raxxorrax 6y ago
  True, although I understand the complaint. Many platforms succumb to bots and power users and they often loose their appeal from that. Most prominent example for me is ebay. Didn't really used it to save money, but it was interesting to browse. Now there is little opportunity for the average user to even visit it, or at least much less so.
- WJW 6y ago
  In related news, lions have sued that the invention of spears by early tribes makes it significantly more difficult to hunt humans and it's taking food off their cubs' table. This sounds very much like ordinary competition that any self-employed person would have to deal with. If I insist on using assembler to make websites for clients while my competitors use Rails, it's not a secret who is going to do better in the long run.
say_it_as_it_is 6y ago
A company offering technological innovation to gain advantages in a market is going to ban shoppers who use technological innovation to gain advantages in their internal market? There's obviously competition among shoppers. The argument presented in this article is that those with technological advantages aren't acting fairly, but considering the dynamics of the shoppers' market, I would argue that they are not only acting fairly but are introducing what can be the next phase of innovation for the entire business. Instacart may have explored instant match in the past but found issues with it. Rather than drop it entirely, maybe they ought to revive the idea but refine it in consideration of what sniping is accomplishing.
Razengan 6y ago
Seems like a solution for eliminating automation could be to make such services only accessible through an [iOS] app, perhaps by requiring Face ID verification on accepting an order.
habosa 6y ago
lf these shoppers are really just "independent contractors" participating in Instacart's open market then Instacart is completely failing as a market maker.
Gravityloss 6y ago
One solution is to make the contracts more even? Or allow some automated auctioning process.
forgotmyp77 6y ago
i couldn't view this site, anyone have a mirror link?
whyhow 6y ago
I think this could be fixed by making each job be posted for a fixed block of time, say five minutes. Then it is randomly assigned to one of the shoppers that selected that job. This would remove the incentive around reaction speed and I don't think the customer would care about the slightly increased time for an order.
- jgalt212 6y ago
  I was here to say the same thing. But you don't even need to extend the time frame to five minutes to defeat the bots. Lisa Marsh, in the article, complained "no human can click that fast." I bet she only needs 10-15 seconds to assess an order. Not for nothing, this is the same mechanism by which the "unfair" advantages of HFT practitioners can be defeated. Run mini-auctions every whole second and randomly allocate fills if there are ties for best bid and/or best offer. Of course, as long as the exchanges deeply care about vanity metrics such as trading volume (trading volume !== liquidity) such measures will never be broadly enacted.
BMSmnqXAE4yfe1 6y ago
Uber handles this by not letting drivers know the destination before they arrive for pickup. Can't instacart offer the same functionality? Like you see the order, shop location, but do not see the amount and other "lucrativity" info. And there is a penalty for cancelling after you accepted.
troydavis 6y ago
I was curious what these actually looked like in the wild and what Instacart shoppers thought. Here's some shoppers discussing bots: https://www.reddit.com/r/InstacartShoppers/comments/gshom2/here_is_the_bot_saw_someone_say_they_bought_it_in/ https://www.reddit.com/r/InstacartShoppers/comments/gshom2/h... https://www.reddit.com/r/InstacartShoppers/comments/fagva2/does_anyone_use_an_auto_click_tool_of_some_kind/ https://www.reddit.com/r/InstacartShoppers/comments/fagva2/d... https://www.reddit.com/r/software/comments/7mfxmh/a_good_free_autoclicker_program/ https://www.reddit.com/r/software/comments/7mfxmh/a_good_fre... The most commonly-mentioned example is "MurGee Auto Clicker" (a simple form clicker: https://www.murgee.com/auto-clicker/tutorial/ https://www.murgee.com/auto-clicker/tutorial/) and miscellaneous Android form clickers.
catsarebetter 6y ago
This has been happening for some time now, unfortunately, IC doesn't give af b/c the orders are still fulfilled. In the 4 sided marketplace they balance, usually the shopper experience ranks last in priorities, like in all gig economy apps

189 points by wallflower 6y ago

I had come across a video couple of months ago showing this in action. Captcha was mentioned a few times on the thread. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nwCh4rtAOWc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nwCh4rtAOWc

gruez 6y ago
I love how the kneejerk reaction to any bot problem is "captchas". I'm not sure how that would even help. If there are 20 jobs available, and 3 of them are high paying, having a bot sort through the list for you still gives you an advantage. Sure, it's better than having someone claim all 3 of them at the same time, but you can achive the same effect by having a cooldown of 5 seconds (enforced server side). Also, with a cooldown, you can't get an advantage (eg. entering a captcha faster with keyboard)

fosk 6y ago

Any system - or market - sophisticated enough will see the emergence of bots as the ultimate decision makers/arbitration players. It’s quite fascinating.

chii 6y ago
the problem stems from the fact that instacart is not doing a proper 'auction' of the orders to all participants. if the instacart platform allows all deliverers to bid on a task (where each deliverer bids their % take of the order), and the lowest % take wins the bid, then this will give everyone a fair chance at taking all jobs.
082349872349872 6y ago
My groceries are delivered by employees (either of the chain or of the postal service, and on rare occasions, of DPD). No need to hate the player when one simply avoids the precariat game.

mitchbob 6y ago

Article also at https://www.seattletimes.com/business/instacart-shoppers-besieged-by-bots-that-snatch-lucrative-orders/ https://www.seattletimes.com/business/instacart-shoppers-bes...

dang 6y ago
Ok, we'll change to that from https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-07-31/instacart-shoppers-besieged-by-bots-that-snatch-lucrative-orders https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-07-31/instacart... on the assumption that more people can read it. Thanks!

Johnny555 6y ago

Maybe the best strategy is to tip low when placing the order, then increase the tip after delivery to reward the guy who needed the money enough to take your order with a low tip.

gruez 6y ago
why not just tip them in cash?
- troydavis 6y ago
  Many or most deliveries are contactless: https://news.instacart.com/introducing-leave-at-my-door-delivery-new-doorstep-delivery-service-now-available-across-north-f06f9e3bd346 https://news.instacart.com/introducing-leave-at-my-door-deli...
  - derwiki 6y ago
    I doubt an Instacart contractor would turn down a cash tip. Pre-COVID, I exclusively tipped Lyft drivers cash. Yes I had to keep small bills around. Ended up not being a big deal.
  - dylan604 6y ago
    Taping an envelope to your door clearly visible for the delivery person would still remain contactless. If the envelope is still there when you pick up your items, then no harm in trying
    - Johnny555 6y ago
      And if it's not, then you'll wonder if it went to the Instacart driver or the UPS guy. (well, not my UPS guy, he's actually a she, and she gives my dogs treats when she sees him)
      - dylan604 6y ago
        You kind of know if you have deliveries coming to your house, right? You get to schedule your Insta deliveries, so just don't make your Insta deliver 10:30am, 3pm, or 9pm. Should avoid the UPS delivery

WWLink 6y ago

This strikes me as unethical.

missedthecue 6y ago
What is unethical to you? Is it the competition that is bad or is using technology to compete the bad thing?

function_seven 6y ago

I'm going to go out on a limb and guess that this is only possible on Android, right? The video linked by ultimoo shows an Android, and my perception is that iOS sandboxing is much tighter. How can Instacart combat this? They can't require iOS among their shoppers. Is it going to be an arms race of heuristics and anti-cheat code like it is for games that want to prevent aim-bots? Or they could start running their own algorithm on the back-end, release juicy batches first to shoppers that haven't gotten a good one recently.

rtsil 6y ago
They can add any sort of captcha challenge or publish fake juicy shopping orders as honeypot, since the bots will instantly grab them. Of course, the next step will be to pay a sweatshop in a poor country to contantly monitor and grab the offers. There's no end to human greed, as evidenced by the Uber Eats couriers outsourcing to undocumented migrants at pennies on the dollar (or the euro) in France.
- botwriter 6y ago
  funny you say that I think the same thing is happening in the UK with these fast food delivery apps they all seem to be Eritrean.
tptacek 6y ago
Smaller teams than Instacart have put up effective fights against cheating. It's an arms race, but so what? The goal is to make cheating uneconomical, not impossible.
- function_seven 6y ago
  There's always some cost to having to implement countermeasures. In games, I've seen seen poorly-implemented anti-cheat software kick or ban legitimate players from their games. A sibling comment mentioned captchas. That would suck for legitimate Instacart shoppers. Imagine frantically looking for each photo that has a stop sign in it, knowing that the orders you're trying to claim could be snatched up by someone who's a faster captcha solver. Somehow there's always a cost when bots start to wage war against other bots. Sure, they can figure out how to minimize it for the human, while making it uneconomical for the bots to exist. I guess I'm just curious how they're going to do that. Because I can already see the blog post now: "Instacart Banned Me for No Reason"

gruez 6y ago

Is there a reason why instacart even allows you to pick orders? It seems like this exploit can be stopped just by only letting shoppers look at the first few items of the queue, and limiting the amount of skips.

mnm1 6y ago
That could be construed as Instacart assigning orders to their shoppers which would likely make them employees eligible for benefits, something they want to avoid at all costs. This may already be the case in CA regardless of what they do, but they definitely want to avoid paying any benefits for their workers in any state where this is not yet currently the case.
- chefandy 6y ago
  Definitely this. They don't care who gets the orders as long as they're gotten, and assigning the work to people rather than letting people pick from a pool makes them look more like an employer/dispatcher rather than a broker.
- slfnflctd 6y ago
  > construed as Instacart assigning orders to their shoppers Uber & Lyft assign rides to drivers. [You can still cancel them after they ping you, but it's discouraged.] It seems to me like it works extremely well overall compared to what Instacart is doing.
Fogest 6y ago
Grocery shopping is a bit different from just picking up a food order. You may only have the time (or desire) to do smaller orders and not want to deal with larger more time consuming ones. Or maybe you don't want to drive farther to certain stores etc....
- dragonwriter 6y ago
  Sure, but all of those could be addressed by allowing setting available-for criteria rather than browse-and-select. Or they could just not display tips in advance; since tips can be altered after delivery, it's misleading to treat them as part of the bargain of accepting a delivery anyway, advance entry should be viewed as a convenience for the orderer to enter a default amount based one expected service, not an inducement. If the tips aren't visible in advance, bots can't snatch “lucrative” orders, because they can't find them.

neonate 6y ago

https://archive.is/2TgtR https://archive.is/2TgtR

rayhendricks 6y ago

Wow saw that video, maybe someone got into their API? What if someone from a non-USA location started selling access to the best batches in prime USA locations e.g. SF/LA/SEA/NYC/DC then we could start trading and packaging up those batches and trading on them in crypto exchanges, maybe even make a new coin? Also having someone put in a SSN is not any kind of verification if you’re trying to subcontract out to people not in the country legally/documented. The ssn algorithm is known and it is easy to generate, it just don’t get fixed because politics. Maybe we have finally found a decent use for eth?

gruez 6y ago
>e.g. SF/LA/SEA/NYC/DC then we could start trading and packaging up those batches and trading on them in crypto exchanges, maybe even make a new coin? In that case you might as well make claiming orders be based on a dutch auction system.
- arcticbull 6y ago
  And without ETH. Just with, you know, a server. With a dutch auction.

mkatx 6y ago

Reminds me of working at amazon doing prime deliveries and using an Android app where you can create flow charts to automate grabbing hours. The difference is amazon at the time didn't care. We even reported what we were doing as a bug, and recommended a queue system instead, yet we only got automated responses not mentioning the issue at all. This automation included an annoying screen refresh, where you hit back and then reenter to see if the button is lit up to get hours. I remember feeling terrible sitting in the warehouse waiting for an order and seeing others clicking back and forth as fast as they can the entire time, all while my phone was silently, with the screen disabled, 'scanning' for hours. I think they consider the warehouse drivers like what I used to do temporary, till they get their drone fleets up. Regarding instacart, and these systems in general, a queue system is just the most fair option. Your take home pay shouldn't be reduced to how well you can click a touch screen or whether you happen to be aware of app automation. It doesn't even seem to benefit the platform itself, just degrade the experience of the driver's.

CydeWeys 6y ago
Fyi, the word is "queue".
- mkatx 6y ago
  Haha, your right.
  - nezgar 6y ago
    you're
aphextron 6y ago
>I think they consider the warehouse drivers like what I used to do temporary, till they get their drone fleets up. Why even bother with drones when you can pay a person $8/HR with zero benefits thanks to collusion with lawmakers to bust unions and stall the minimum wage?
- 6y ago

benatkin 6y ago

.app is great for giving official-sounding domain names to scammers. Way to go, Google. Eventually more .app domains will be squatted, the price will go up, and companies will buy domains proactively (like instashopper.app - instashopper is obvious shorthand for Instacart Shopper, the official term) but not before a lot of unethical enterprises take advantage of it.

sneak 6y ago

The bots aren’t snatching the orders. Other shoppers, competing for the same business, are using software programs to compete more effectively and efficiently. This is not an exploit. Access to deal flow is first-come, first-served.

meritt 6y ago

No clue what Instacart shoppers do. What makes the orders lucrative/better? Is it high dollar orders, or multiple orders at the same grocery store, or is the tip pre-published, or what's the criteria when looking for orders to fulfill?

pishpash 6y ago
Lucrative orders are mispriced orders, no ifs and buts. That's how efficient markets work.
- erik_seaberg 6y ago
  Instacart customers should be paying more for long trips and bulky items and short deadlines. Clarke once observed that “In orbit, caviar is cheaper than bread.” Paying them more for valuable items only makes sense if the service includes preventing heists.
smt88 6y ago
I don't know the exact formula, but they get tipped on the price of the order (like a server at a US restaurant would). Instacart customers are charged a flat delivery fee, so multiple orders also seems like a factor.
behnamoh 6y ago
I think it means orders which will result in higher tips.

JumpCrisscross 6y ago

> some shoppers are paying software developers who have created bots — in the form of third-party apps — that run alongside the legitimate Instacart app and claim the best orders for clients Instacart is a real-time market. In real-time markets reaction time is paramount. "Cranking up pressure against app makers and banning violators when they find them" is swimming up a waterfall. The solution is in the market structure. Fundamentally, Instacart needs to shift to batch processing. This could take several forms. They could, on order submission, open a 60-second auction window. The best qualifying bid wins. Bids, mind you, could come in dollars or time to delivery or something else. Alternatively, shoppers could set orders parameters within which they guarantee acceptance. Orders could then be randomly assigned to online shoppers, perhaps with a bias towards ratings and other metrics. Either way, a real-time market, where the first shopper to accept an order, seems under-optimised. > cost of the third-party apps ranges from $250 to $600 in cryptocurrency or bank deposits Instagram should acquire the differentiated apps and integrate them into its routing. Showing every order to every shopper is inefficient. Some of these bots will just click on every order every shopper would find attractive. Those are zero sum. But some, I assume, help shoppers pick orders uniquely suited to them. Those are positive sum, and worth integrating into Instacart per se. Fascinating stuff, nevertheless.

fossuser 6y ago
I'd be surprised if Instacart could pull this off, their app is one of the worst pieces of software I use on a regular basis. Really confusing UX, simple things like looking up previous orders are several clicks and popups away. It's extremely, painfully slow (page loads take seconds and refresh often, I have a gigabit connection). Want to add things you always buy? It'll show you things you often buy in a weird side scroll thing. Pop ups of sales and extra things, confusing calls to attention everywhere. Click that option to add what you've previously ordered? Hopefully you haven't already added some stuff because it's not smart about adding things, it'll just increment everything already in your cart that was also in your previous order. Group cart where you have express? Make sure you're the one to click order, if a roommate does you won't get the free delivery. Lots of extra fees, order soda? heavy order fee, get alcohol? extra alcohol fee. I've gotten used to it, but it's not a great experience.

balozi 6y ago

Instacart could wipe away this feature in one afternoon if they wanted.

malwarebytess 6y ago

When I was in college 10 years ago I did Amazon's Mechanical Turk to pay my way through. One of the things I did to make my life less miserable was to automate a lot of the searching, sifting, and grabbing of jobs (hits.) Bot would only accept jobs that fit my specified time/money ratio, or known hits that paid well and predictably. Having the experience of using these "gig" side jobs I don't think there's anything wrong with people automating them to make the work less miserable and more lucrative. Frankly, anything but the best paying jobs cost more to do per hour than a federal minimum wage job. Thanks to automation I made around $16/hour (and I also had to pay taxes on that so it wasn't even that good!) Don't hate the player, hate the game. And the game here is cutthroat and designed to exploit 1099 workers for below market labor cost.

tesmar2 6y ago
If there was an alternative, higher wage they would pick that. This is the market labor cost.
- redis_mlc 6y ago
  > If there was an alternative, higher wage they would pick that. This is the market labor cost. Cue the obligatory pedantic HN Econ 101 analysis. Actually, most interviews with Turks say the payment is less important than being able to do hits between classes, or without any commuting. Also, some workloads are done on Turk as carefully planned statistical trials, which cannot easily be done offline. So, nothing to do with HN Econ 101 today. Class is out.
- MichaelGlass 6y ago
  "below market" because Instacart (and uber, etc) forgo normal labor law, have by-default but not by-contract full-time workers without any full-time benefits. Companies can achieve great benefit by externalizing cost on society, but should they? (And should they be able to?) e.g. https://www.forbes.com/sites/ebauer/2019/12/16/is-uber-cheating-on-social-securityfica-taxes/#5289694a3ce4 https://www.forbes.com/sites/ebauer/2019/12/16/is-uber-cheat... https://www.forbes.com/sites/clareoconnor/2014/04/15/report-walmart-workers-cost-taxpayers-6-2-billion-in-public-assistance/#4e9896de720b https://www.forbes.com/sites/clareoconnor/2014/04/15/report-...

MarkMarine 6y ago

The last paragraph of this is heartbreaking.

29athrowaway 6y ago

I stopped using Instacart years ago. My reasons were: 1) Shoppers would ring your phone for less than a second, ghost you and then show up with random replacements you never approved. 2) They would fail to deliver on time, then unilaterally reschedule a delivery for another time when I was not even going to be home. 3) Amazon Fresh and Prime Now are far superior services. Amazon Fresh has gotten slightly worse in the last couple of years, but it is still far better than Instacart. Has the service improved lately? Should I use Instacart in 2020?

ralmidani 6y ago

I’m a software developer who has been enthusiastic about technology pretty much my entire life, but lately I’ve started doubting that our current technological advances are even a net positive for humanity. Reading about things like this (and also about online ads, robocalls, tracking, spyware, ransomware, extortionware, massive environment-ravaging crypto-mining ops, state surveillance, “predictive policing”, fake news, state-coordinated FUD campaigns, etc.) makes me want to give it all up and live out what remains of my life in subsistence on a primitive farm.

1596603709 6y ago
Then, you will learn about the plight of the farmers. Really, checkout "Super Size Me 2". I don't think there is any industry where its all gravy. Each industry has its own problems, you can only do your best to contribute in its positive growth. Don't be too hard on yourself. Also, you aren't Ghandi (or insert XYZ person here), don't put too much weight on your shoulders. FWIW none of us really matter, this is a symptom of how North American companies operate. Survival of the fittest. I went through deep depression for similar reasons, so hoping some tough love helps you.
- mikro2nd 6y ago
  I suspect you're conflating/confusing subsistence farming with industrial "farming". As someone who has lived a "subsistence" lifestyle for a long time, now (decades) one can live really quite well on a "sub-poverty-level income" simply because you're quite decoupled from conventional-money economies. I've heard it called "abundance poverty" (not "abundant poverty", to be sure! :) ) It's worth a disclaimer, though: I practise this subsistence (aka "self-sufficiency") living outside the USA. USmmv.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]

galkk 6y ago

> When Marsh opens her Instacart shopping app, she sees promising orders disappear before she can act. “No human can click that fast,” she said. “Instacart needs to fix this. These bots are literally taking the food off my kids’ table.” While I understand the wish to get the best/any batch, this is significant exaggeration. If your kids food depends on getting the batches from the website, then you have much larger problem than bots.

raxxorrax 6y ago
True, although I understand the complaint. Many platforms succumb to bots and power users and they often loose their appeal from that. Most prominent example for me is ebay. Didn't really used it to save money, but it was interesting to browse. Now there is little opportunity for the average user to even visit it, or at least much less so.
WJW 6y ago
In related news, lions have sued that the invention of spears by early tribes makes it significantly more difficult to hunt humans and it's taking food off their cubs' table. This sounds very much like ordinary competition that any self-employed person would have to deal with. If I insist on using assembler to make websites for clients while my competitors use Rails, it's not a secret who is going to do better in the long run.

say_it_as_it_is 6y ago

A company offering technological innovation to gain advantages in a market is going to ban shoppers who use technological innovation to gain advantages in their internal market? There's obviously competition among shoppers. The argument presented in this article is that those with technological advantages aren't acting fairly, but considering the dynamics of the shoppers' market, I would argue that they are not only acting fairly but are introducing what can be the next phase of innovation for the entire business. Instacart may have explored instant match in the past but found issues with it. Rather than drop it entirely, maybe they ought to revive the idea but refine it in consideration of what sniping is accomplishing.

Razengan 6y ago

Seems like a solution for eliminating automation could be to make such services only accessible through an [iOS] app, perhaps by requiring Face ID verification on accepting an order.

habosa 6y ago

lf these shoppers are really just "independent contractors" participating in Instacart's open market then Instacart is completely failing as a market maker.

Gravityloss 6y ago

One solution is to make the contracts more even? Or allow some automated auctioning process.

forgotmyp77 6y ago

i couldn't view this site, anyone have a mirror link?

whyhow 6y ago

I think this could be fixed by making each job be posted for a fixed block of time, say five minutes. Then it is randomly assigned to one of the shoppers that selected that job. This would remove the incentive around reaction speed and I don't think the customer would care about the slightly increased time for an order.

jgalt212 6y ago
I was here to say the same thing. But you don't even need to extend the time frame to five minutes to defeat the bots. Lisa Marsh, in the article, complained "no human can click that fast." I bet she only needs 10-15 seconds to assess an order. Not for nothing, this is the same mechanism by which the "unfair" advantages of HFT practitioners can be defeated. Run mini-auctions every whole second and randomly allocate fills if there are ties for best bid and/or best offer. Of course, as long as the exchanges deeply care about vanity metrics such as trading volume (trading volume !== liquidity) such measures will never be broadly enacted.

BMSmnqXAE4yfe1 6y ago

Uber handles this by not letting drivers know the destination before they arrive for pickup. Can't instacart offer the same functionality? Like you see the order, shop location, but do not see the amount and other "lucrativity" info. And there is a penalty for cancelling after you accepted.

troydavis 6y ago

I was curious what these actually looked like in the wild and what Instacart shoppers thought. Here's some shoppers discussing bots: https://www.reddit.com/r/InstacartShoppers/comments/gshom2/here_is_the_bot_saw_someone_say_they_bought_it_in/ https://www.reddit.com/r/InstacartShoppers/comments/gshom2/h... https://www.reddit.com/r/InstacartShoppers/comments/fagva2/does_anyone_use_an_auto_click_tool_of_some_kind/ https://www.reddit.com/r/InstacartShoppers/comments/fagva2/d... https://www.reddit.com/r/software/comments/7mfxmh/a_good_free_autoclicker_program/ https://www.reddit.com/r/software/comments/7mfxmh/a_good_fre... The most commonly-mentioned example is "MurGee Auto Clicker" (a simple form clicker: https://www.murgee.com/auto-clicker/tutorial/ https://www.murgee.com/auto-clicker/tutorial/) and miscellaneous Android form clickers.

catsarebetter 6y ago

This has been happening for some time now, unfortunately, IC doesn't give af b/c the orders are still fulfilled. In the 4 sided marketplace they balance, usually the shopper experience ranks last in priorities, like in all gig economy apps