Retailers always know what their customers have purchased. They had little idea what their customers were buying.
Customers pick up items and put them back, compare items and reject one, or walk through the aisle twice before moving on.
Data gaps are where merchandising decisions are wrong, promotional funds are misallocated, and brands lose out on sales they didn’t know were available. Instacart’s artificial intelligence-powered Caper Carts are designed to close it down.
According to a June 4 press release, Instacart and Weis Markets are currently rolling out Caper Carts to select Weis stores in Pennsylvania. The move brings real-time basket tracking, personalized coupons, loyalty redemption, and on-cart advertising directly into Weis grocery store aisles.
The cart is equipped with a basket-facing camera, a metrology-certified scale, location tracking, and an outward-facing camera connected to a touchscreen, all input into a cloud AI system trained on more than 1.6 billion online grocery orders, according to the release.
A working signal already exists in the system. Basket size increased by nearly 1 percent on average, according to in-cart prompt releases such as “Do you have everything you need?”
This is a small number for one trip, but a significant number for millions of trips.
Caper Carts are currently in use in more than 100 cities in 15 states and featured on the banners of more than a dozen retailers, including Kroger, Schnucks and Wakefern. Instacart tripled its Caper Cart deployments year-over-year, according to the release.
Also read: Instacart: Grocery shoppers avoid merchants that don’t offer smart carts.
Smart Cart captures what shoppers are considering but not buying
The commercial case for smart carts is based on datasets that brick-and-mortar stores have not been able to build before. Online retailers have always tracked what users search for, what they click on, what they add and remove from their carts, and how much time they spend on product pages. Stores only track what is purchased.
Smart carts that monitor what goes into your basket, what gets removed, which location-based offers trigger purchases, and which get ignored, generate the physical equivalent of clickstream data. This is a continuous record of the intent of shoppers who did not reach a receipt.
“As a leader in physical AI, we are giving retailers like Weis Markets a competitive advantage by unifying in-store and online data through technologies like Caper Carts, allowing them to understand and respond to customers with a level of intelligence not previously possible,” said David McIntosh, chief executive of connected stores at Instacart, in a press release.
Instacart reported total transaction value for the first quarter of 2026 was $10.29 billion, an increase of 13% year over year. Consumer Insights Portal, which provides brands with real-time consumer behavior data, added Kraft Heinz as a new subscriber in the same quarter.
Caper Cart extends that data layer from the online basket to the physical store.
See also: How Instacart is shaping the next generation of grocery shoppers
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Instacart isn’t the only company building this dataset.
Amazon launched its Store Analytics service in 2022 to show brands how their products are being discovered, considered, and purchased in physical stores. The company is currently expanding Dash Cart to dozens of Whole Foods Market stores across the United States.
In 2024, Walmart Chile introduced AI-powered smart carts to five Rider Express stores using computer vision technology that recognizes thousands of products with more than 95% accuracy.
The behavioral data these systems generate is more than just an operational asset. It’s an advertising asset. Weis Markets launches on-cart advertising with Caper Carts, giving brands a channel to reach shoppers in the aisle at the moment of decision-making, rather than before or after.
According to the PYMNTS Intelligence report, “Global Digital Shopping Index: The Arrival of the AI-Powered Shopper,” 47% of online shoppers said they used AI during a recent purchase, and 64% said they expect to use an AI shopping agent within two years. This shift is reducing the scope for brick-and-mortar stores to claim data superiority.
The AI agents that process grocery orders from smartphones never enter the store and do not generate behavioral signals within the aisles. The smart cart generates that signal precisely because the signal exists when the shopper changes their mind.
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