What Happened?
Shares of online grocery delivery platform Instacart (NASDAQ: CART) fell 4.7% in the morning session after its key competitor, Amazon, announced a new partnership with grocery chain Winn-Dixie to expand its grocery delivery service in Florida.
This collaboration focused on the Jacksonville and Orlando areas, offering customers over 16,000 items via Amazon's platform. The strategic move positions Amazon as a formidable competitor in the grocery delivery market. Investors reacted to the heightened competitive pressure, which sparked concerns about Instacart's ability to defend its market share in these key Florida regions.
The stock market overreacts to news, and big price drops can present good opportunities to buy high-quality stocks. Is now the time to buy Instacart? Access our full analysis report here, it’s free.
What Is The Market Telling Us
Instacart’s shares are somewhat volatile and have had 14 moves greater than 5% over the last year. In that context, today’s move indicates the market considers this news meaningful but not something that would fundamentally change its perception of the business.
The previous big move we wrote about was 4 days ago when the stock gained 1.3% on the news that the company announced a partnership with UK-based supermarket Morrisons to launch its AI-powered smart trolleys, marking the technology's first deployment in the United Kingdom.
The "Caper Carts" will allow customers to scan items as they shop, track their spending in real time, and complete their checkout seamlessly. This collaboration will begin at a single Morrisons store in early 2026, with the potential for a wider rollout in the future. The move signifies a key international expansion for Instacart's retail technology. This news follows another recent partnership, where e-commerce provider Vroom Delivery linked with Instacart to offer digital advertising tools to Vroom's network of 3,500 convenience stores, further extending the reach of Instacart's services.
Instacart is up 0.7% since the beginning of the year, but at $43.35 per share, it is still trading 18.4% below its 52-week high of $53.15 from February 2025. Investors who bought $1,000 worth of Instacart’s shares at the IPO in September 2023 would now be looking at an investment worth $1,286.
Today’s young investors won’t have read the timeless lessons in Gorilla Game: Picking Winners In High Technology because it was written more than 20 years ago when Microsoft and Apple were first establishing their supremacy. But if we apply the same principles, then enterprise software stocks leveraging their own generative AI capabilities may well be the Gorillas of the future. So, in that spirit, we are excited to present our Special Free Report on a profitable, fast-growing enterprise software stock that is already riding the automation wave and looking to catch the generative AI next.
