Maplebear - Earnings Call - Q1 2025

Executive Summary

• Q1 2025 beat internal targets and delivered solid top-line and profitability: Orders grew 14% YoY to 83.2M, GTV rose 10% YoY to $9.12B, revenue increased 9% YoY to $897M, and Adjusted EBITDA rose 23% YoY to $244M, with margins expanding to 27% of revenue.
• Revenue slightly topped S&P Global consensus ($897.0M vs $896.9M*) and S&P “Primary EPS” beat ($0.50 vs $0.39*), while GAAP diluted EPS was $0.37 (down YoY on higher SBC and legal/regulatory items). Values retrieved from S&P Global*.
• Mix and strategic investments drove dynamics: Average order value declined 4% YoY to $110 on Restaurants mix and the $10 Instacart+ basket threshold, but higher order frequency and users powered orders growth; Ads & Other outpaced GTV (+14% YoY) and remained resilient.
• Q2 2025 outlook: GTV $8.85–$9.00B (8–10% YoY) and Adjusted EBITDA $240–$250M; management reiterated annual Adjusted EBITDA expansion in 2025, while flagging pockets of advertiser caution tied to tariffs/regulatory uncertainty.

What Went Well and What Went Wrong

What Went Well

• Strong demand and operating leverage: Fastest orders growth in 10 quarters (+14% YoY), robust GTV (+10% YoY), Ads & Other +14% YoY, and Adjusted EBITDA +23% YoY to $244M (27% margin).
• Product/AI execution: Management highlighted AI-driven Smart Shop, AI pairings on ~75% of marketplace orders driving higher retention among new users, and inventory intelligence (Store View) improving order quality and found/fill rates.
• Enterprise and ads flywheel: Carrot Ads scale (220+ retail sites) and performance continue to attract partners (including Uber’s U.S. grocery/retail marketplace); Universal Campaigns simplifies budgets and optimizes formats with AI.

What Went Wrong

• GAAP earnings declined: Net income fell YoY to $106M (from $130M) as GAAP OpEx rose on SBC normalization (lap of prior-year reversals), legal/regulatory costs, and higher paid marketing; diluted EPS was $0.37 vs $0.43 in Q1’24.
• AOV pressure: AOV fell 4% YoY to $110 on Restaurants mix and lower Instacart+ basket threshold; transaction revenue %GTV dipped to 7.1% (from 7.2% in Q1’24) as affordability investments were partially offset by shopper efficiency gains.
• Advertiser macro watch-outs: Management cited advertiser caution tied to tariffs and regulatory uncertainty (e.g., SNAP eligibility, ingredients rules) even as performance positioning helps offset risk.

Transcript

Operator (participant)

Good day, and thank you for standing by. Welcome to Instacart's First Quarter 2025 Financial Results Conference Call. At this time, all participants are in a listen-only mode. After the speaker's presentation, there will be a question-and-answer session. To ask a question during the session, you will need to press star 11 on your telephone. Please limit yourself to one question and one follow-up so that we will have enough time to address everyone's questions. Please be advised that today's conference is being recorded. I would now like to hand the conference over to Rebecca Yoshiyama, VP of Investor Relations, Capital Markets, and Treasury. Please go ahead.

Rebecca Yoshiyama (VP of Investor Relations, Capital Markets, and Treasury)

Thank you, Operator, and welcome everyone to Instacart's First Quarter 2025 Earnings Call. On the call with me today are Fidji Simo, our Chief Executive Officer, and Emily Reuter, our Chief Financial Officer. During today's call, we will make forward-looking statements related to our business plans and strategy, impacts from macroeconomic conditions, and our future performance and prospects, including our expectations regarding our financial results. These forward-looking statements are subject to risks and uncertainties, which could cause actual results to differ materially from those anticipated. You can find more information about these risks and uncertainties in our SEC filings, including our last Form 10-K. We assume no obligation to update these statements after today's call, except as required by law. In addition, we'll also discuss certain non-GAAP financial measures, which have limitations and should not be considered in isolation from or as a substitute for our GAAP results.

A reconciliation between these GAAP and non-GAAP financial measures is included in our shareholder letter, which can be found on our Investor Relations website. Now, I'll turn over the call to Fidji for her opening remarks.

Fidji Simo (CEO)

Thank you, Rebecca, and good afternoon, everyone. I hope you've had a chance to review my shareholder letter, where I highlighted how we've had a good start to the year and how we're innovating to accelerate online grocery adoption. Our operating fundamentals are strong, and we're well-positioned to drive growth for both our business and our partners. Groceries are essential, and we operate in a massive market that's still significantly underpenetrated online. Consumers today care deeply about convenience, affordability, quality, and selection, and that's exactly what we deliver. Whether it's saving families' time, helping them stick to a budget, or offering the largest selection of retailers, we're making life simpler for millions of households every week. That focus has established Instacart as a clear category leader among digital first players in both small and large baskets.

By doubling down on what we do best, we're consistently driving user growth, order frequency, and Instacart Plus adoption. In terms of recent trends, we look at a lot of data across our business, and even though macro uncertainty remains, we have not seen any unexpected changes in consumer behavior through April. We reached 98% of households in North America, and customer engagement remains consistent across geographies and income levels. Customers are continuing to shop at premium and discount retailers, although price parity retailers are collectively growing faster on our marketplace, a trend we've highlighted before. Demand is robust across our many use cases, from weekly grocery trips and stock-up orders to higher-frequency restaurant and fill-in grocery orders. Average item prices on our platform continue to track in line with inflation, and basket sizes remain resilient as customers generally shop with a budget.

A key reason our business can be so resilient is that we have deep retailer partnerships that go beyond surface-level integrations. For more than a decade, we have built deep technical partnerships that enable everything from loyalty and promotions to inventory accuracy and fulfillment. Whether it's through our marketplace, white-label storefronts, or in-store innovation like Paper Carts, our solutions are helping retailers modernize faster, operate more efficiently, and better serve their customers. These partnerships also strengthen our platform by expanding value for customers through better prices and selection, improving efficiency across our operations, and giving us access to growing parts of the market that no one else has tapped into like we have. Today, we announced the acquisition of Wynshop, which will allow us to power storefronts for even more retailers and double down on our enterprise strategy. Our retail media offering is another area where we're uniquely positioned.

We provide a one-stop shop for brands looking for highly measurable, highly performing campaigns that reach customers at the point of purchase with precision and scale. This value was reflected in our strong Q1 advertising performance, as well as the fact that more and more large partners like Uber Eats and Hy-Vee are choosing Carrot Ads to monetize their own properties with our ad platform. While we continue to see strength in our advertising trends to date, we unsurprisingly have started to hear concerns from brands about how uncertainty around trade policies and other regulations could impact their ability to spend on marketing. Even though no ad platform will be immune to macroeconomic risks, our performance-driven ad model and the work we have done to diversify our advertising base over the past year helps make our platform more resilient and very well-positioned to remain a leader in the space.

Finally, across every part of our business, we're continuing to leverage AI to work smarter, move faster, and further establish Instacart as a leader in AI-driven development. In Q1 alone, 87% of our code was developed with AI assistance, unlocking a level of speed, creativity, and efficiency that was not possible before. Whether it's Smart Shop, which delivers a more personalized and seamless customer experience, or new tools that benefit retailers both on our marketplace and their own and operated storefronts, or universal campaigns, which gives brands a simplified and scalable way to connect customers across our ad ecosystem, AI is the driving force behind it all. Ultimately, our purpose is clear: solve real needs for our customers, drive growth for our partners, and execute towards our long-term vision.

By continuing to lean into what makes us successful and making disciplined but aggressive investments, I'm confident in our ability to not only extend our lead but help accelerate the future of grocery shopping in a way that benefits everyone. Now, I'll turn it over to Emily to talk about our financials.

Emily Reuter (CFO)

Thank you, Fidji. Q1 was a strong quarter for Instacart, and our solid operating fundamentals and growth strategies have us well-positioned for continued progress in 2025 and beyond. Now, let me provide a bit more color on our most recent financial results and outlook. In Q1, we delivered GTV at the top end of our guidance range, growing 10% year over year. This performance was driven by a 14% increase in orders, the strongest year-over-year order growth we've delivered in 10 quarters, driven by increases in both order frequency and users. As anticipated, we also saw average order value decrease by 4% year over year due to the addition of restaurant orders and reducing our minimum basket size to $10 for Instacart Plus members, though this was partially offset by growth in basket sizes elsewhere.

Transaction revenue grew 8% year over year and held steady at 7.1% of GTV quarter over quarter. Advertising and other revenue increased by 14% year over year, outpacing GTV growth and exceeding our expectations with strong contributions from both large and emerging brand partners. Profitability remained a highlight, reflecting our solid operating fundamentals and financial discipline as we continue to effectively manage multiple levers across our P&L to drive efficiencies. GAAP net income of $106 million decreased by $24 million year over year, primarily due to the lapping of $95 million of stock-based comp reversals in Q1 of 2024.

Q1 stock-based comp of $66 million was slightly lower than we expected, and as a reminder, we continue to expect Q1 to be our lowest quarter of stock-based comp in a calendar year, followed by a sizable step-up in stock-based comp in Q2 due to the timing of our annual refresh grants. Adjusted EBITDA of $244 million exceeded the high end of our guidance range, growing 23% year over year. Operating cash flow of $298 million increased $193 million year over year, primarily driven by the collection of a large accounts receivable balance from a retailer, in addition to our strong operational performance. In Q1, we also bought back $94 million worth of shares and finished the quarter with $218 million of remaining buyback capacity.

We ended the quarter with approximately $1.8 billion in cash and similar assets on our balance sheet and recently used approximately $105 million in cash for our acquisition of Wynshop. Now for our Q2 outlook. Similar to prior quarters, our guidance is based on our closest-to-the-pin estimates based on what we've seen in our business through today. However, we are operating in a period with lots of macro uncertainty, and in particular, we know this could lead to more volatility amongst our brand partners and their advertising budgets. Based on current course and speed, we expect Q2 GTV to be between $8.85 billion and $9 billion, representing year-over-year growth between 8% to 10%. We also continue to anticipate that orders growth will outpace GTV growth in the period. We are also guiding to Q2 adjusted EBITDA of $240 million-$250 million.

We expect the year-over-year growth in adjusted EBITDA as a percentage of GTV to be primarily driven by ongoing adjusted operating expense leverage, and we expect advertising and other revenue growth to modestly outpace our anticipated GTV growth in the period. Overall, we're pleased with our strong start to the year, and we're well-positioned to navigate current macro conditions. Instacart has proven that we can grow through uncertainty, and we're laser-focused on helping our partners succeed no matter what lies ahead. Our operating fundamentals and balance sheet are strong, which gives us the ability to reinvest in growth initiatives while executing on our commitment to deliver annual adjusted EBITDA expansion, both in absolute terms and as a percentage of GTV in 2025. With that, we will open up the call for live questions. Operator, you may begin.

Operator (participant)

Certainly. As a reminder, to ask a question, you will need to press star 11 on your telephone. Please limit yourself to one question and one follow-up. Please stand by while we compile our Q&A roster. One moment for our first question, which will be coming from Colin Sebastian of Baird. Your line is open.

Colin Sebastian (Managing Director and Senior Equity Research Analyst of Internet and Digital Media)

Yep. Good afternoon. Can you guys hear me okay?

Fidji Simo (CEO)

We can.

Colin Sebastian (Managing Director and Senior Equity Research Analyst of Internet and Digital Media)

Great. First question I have, I guess, is on the ads business. Hoping, given some of the progress there, you could unpack what you're seeing from both the core CPG advertisers and then maybe the contribution from the longer tail that you've been working to unlock here for some time. I mean, given some of the early shifts that we're seeing kind of broadly towards agentic commerce and the investments you guys are putting towards that, I wonder if you could expand a bit on your vision for how Instacart fits in that paradigm of agents placing orders on behalf of consumers. Maybe some details you have on shopping behavior. You mentioned retention in the letter, but behavior changes that may be influenced by things like the recipe-driven ordering and other things on that would be helpful. Thank you.

Fidji Simo (CEO)

Great. Thanks, Colin. I'll start with ads. We had a very strong Q1, as you saw in the result, and it was driven by both large and emerging brands, which is really encouraging. As I've mentioned in past calls, we have been very focused on diversifying our base of advertisers, and we now have more than 7,000 brands that are onboarded and spending with us. That diversification really is working. If you look at Q1, really, it's a proof that the entire strategy is coming together because it has really been driven by our high performance. We continue to be best in class in both ROAS as well as CTR among large multi-retail platforms.

We continue to have product innovation with new ad formats, as well as continuing to increase our supply with some of the wins we've had in expanding Carrot Ads, which are very meaningful and contribute to really a virtuous cycle of getting more supply, which drives more performance, attracts more demand, and as a result, gets more retailers interested in working with us. It is really a beautiful virtuous cycle that's happening with Carrot Ads and really working now. That is really what we saw, I would say, in Q1, and just saying the strategy is working and we continue to see strength.

In terms of the shift towards agentic commerce, I would say it's still very early, but our strategy is to really embrace new technologies when they happen and be really the first to bring these technologies to people because fundamentally, we believe that if we make it super easy for people to order groceries online, that's going to accelerate market adoption. As a category leader, we can get more than our fair share of that as people move online because we have the superior experience, the superior selection. You have seen us work, for example, with OpenAI on their operator products where we integrate with them for that.

We have our own efforts of figuring out how we can include agentic experiences directly inside Instacart, especially for things like meal planning and really helping you with kind of all of your family needs when it comes to putting food on the table. Very early, but we think this is something that has a lot of potential, and we want to lean into very early to make sure that we extend our lead in this market.

Colin Sebastian (Managing Director and Senior Equity Research Analyst of Internet and Digital Media)

Great. Thanks, Fidji.

Operator (participant)

Our next question will be coming from Neeraj Sandhu of JPMorgan. Your line is open.

Oh, hi. This is Neeraj on for Dhak. Just wanted to understand what are the changes you guys need on the shopper end to economically execute the $10 minimum basket as well as the store check? Do you need to incentivize the shoppers or create a different order flow? I just want to understand how much batching is required to do these orders economically.

Fidji Simo (CEO)

Yeah. Thanks for the question. The reason we're able to do all those economics we like is because we have a very high density of orders in every store. In fact, by launching $10 minimum basket, we're increasing that order density. It's giving us more orders that we can potentially batch. We like the economics we have today. Once we launch, we continue to optimize those economics, and we can increase batching. Today, the vast majority of our orders are already batched, but we can go even higher with the density of $10 minimum basket, for example, batching orders like four at a time instead of three at a time, batching priority orders in the future. These are all things that can continue to improve the economics as order growth continues.

It's also worth mentioning that these orders, the $10 minimum basket orders, these small basket orders tend to skew towards snacks and beverages and therefore categories that are also good for advertising. Given our strength in ads, it's also an advantage to get the economics there to be in a good place. You mentioned Store View and second store check. On second store check, it's very much a similar thing. We have shoppers who visit large format stores on average 14 times a day. That means that we have shoppers inside these stores very frequently. Therefore, if a product is not available at a store, it's very easy for us to check if it's available at a store nearby because in all likelihood, we already have a shopper that's nearby that can go check that out.

The same thing applies for Store View, which is scanning aisles with a shopper's phone to capture videos of inventory. It is a similar thing. We have a lot of shoppers that are already near the store waiting or at the store waiting for an order to come in. That is really an incremental earning opportunity for them to be able to just scan the aisle and give us access to this incredibly rich data that allows us to improve our inventory accuracy while also giving shoppers more earnings opportunities. It is really leveraging our scale, our order density, and the density of shoppers we have at any given store, same store scale.

Got it. Just on ads, I just wanted to understand. Great to see the ad acceleration, but is there any upside that was driven by the launch of ads on Caper Carts?

I would say the launch of ads of Caper Carts is extremely minimal right now in terms of impact to ad revenue. The thing that we're excited about when it comes to ads on paper is the fact that we are seeing a level of engagement with those ads that is equivalent to online engagement, which gives us a lot of confidence in our ability to monetize carts well in the future. I would say, given the scale of paper right now, it's still fairly minimal to our overall ads revenue.

Got it. Thanks so much, Fidji.

Thank you.

Operator (participant)

Our next question will be coming from Nikhil Devnani of Bernstein. Your line is open.

Nikhil Devnani (Senior Analyst)

Hi. Thank you for taking my question. I wanted to ask a longer-term one on advertising. How do you ensure that your ad platform continues to work very well for the long tail of ad buyers that maybe don't have as much organic brand recognition and search? Are their needs very different to that of your big CPG partners? How do you kind of solve and optimize for that?

Fidji Simo (CEO)

This is such an excellent question and something we spend a lot of time thinking about. In fact, you do build a fairly different ad product for emerging brands than you do for large guys for the reason you mentioned, but also they orient much more towards self-serve tools. We have done a lot of work to make our tools a lot more self-serve. They have much less time and much fewer resources to analyze insights. We have made it so that with AI, we can deliver insights to them and tell them what to do next to optimize our campaign in a much easier way. All of these things are things that we definitely do build very differently.

On your specific point on how do we create discovery for them, this is exactly why we are launching things like our Inspiration Ads, which are all about being discovered outside of the aisle that you usually are in. To give a concrete example, we have Sponsored Recipes. That's a good opportunity if you're buying one particular ingredient. If we show you, "Oh, look at these Sponsored Recipes," to make you discover a lot of other products as part of that. We just released a case study with Nature Nate's Honey, which generated 36%-37% new-to-brand sales and a 2-4x ROAS throughout the campaign. When we looked at several campaigns from Sponsored Recipes, we saw that 70% of ad impression came out of the aisle of the initial thing that the customer was looking at, which is really good for discovery.

Same thing when it comes to other ad formats like Bundles and Occasions, which are all about upselling you to different products that you might be interested in based on what you just put in your cart. That is working really well. The last thing I'll add is we launched this quarter Universal Campaigns. Universal Campaigns is basically a way to make sure that if you set up one campaign, we can really automatically, through AI, distribute your ad across a bunch of different places. That helps a lot when it comes to emerging brands because sometimes if they just do sponsored products, they might not, to your point, get all of the traffic that they would want. We would want to actively redirect those budgets towards display ads where they're going to be discovered in other places and not necessarily in search.

That allows us to dynamically move budgets to make sure that we can maximize the advertisers' goals, maximize discovery, and do that dynamically without the brand having to do a lot of work to figure that out themselves. We are seeing all of that work, and that's reflected in the strengths that we continue to have on emerging brands' budgets that are really coming strong into the system.

Nikhil Devnani (Senior Analyst)

Thanks, Fidji. If I could just follow up on the small basket orders, now that you've had a bit more time for that program to ramp, are you still confident that these are predominantly incremental orders and any signs of better Instacart Plus retention or conversion rates because of these changed delivery thresholds? Thank you.

Fidji Simo (CEO)

Yes. It's a strong yes on both. We are seeing higher GTV, increased order frequency, stronger Instacart Plus adoption. These are things, as you can imagine, that we track very closely. We have not seen cannibalization of large baskets. We have seen very clear incremental GTV. That's coming both from existing users, but also from new users and resurrected users. It is really having a lot of benefits across the board, which is why we feel very good about it. When I mentioned that it increases order frequency, that really means that it's really increasing order frequency at every stage. We are moving yearly active orders to be quarterly active more frequently, quarterly active to monthly active, and then monthly active to weekly active, all increasing and going in the right direction. We are really excited about what we're seeing.

We're also seeing in terms of qualitative use case that it's driving more midweek fill-in grocery orders. We're seeing that being particularly strong in dense urban areas where customers are more likely to not have a vehicle. It's really fulfilling the promise and the hypothesis that we had when we launched, and that's why we're really committed to it.

Nikhil Devnani (Senior Analyst)

Thanks a lot, Fidji.

Operator (participant)

Thank you. Our next question will be coming from Bernie McTernan of Needham & Company. Your line is open, Bernie.

Bernie McTernan (Senior Analyst)

Great. Thanks for taking the question. Just given the acquisition of Wynshop, I was hoping we'd just take a step back and Fidji, if you could just remind us of your enterprise strategy and if these are discrete revenue opportunities or more so indirect where you have the opportunity to get more data and integration with your grocery partners and what holes specifically is Wynshop filling for you guys?

Fidji Simo (CEO)

Absolutely. To take a step back, our enterprise strategy is both a big driver of GTV and revenue because it allows us to tap into a part of the market that no one else is able to tap into. That makes us really be able to tap into the part of the market that retailers own. That means that when retailers want to lean into online, they usually decide to put marketing budgets behind their own properties. Because we power that, that benefits us a great deal. We have approximately 600 storefronts, so that's imagine 600 retail banners really putting their weight behind another part of the market. That is a big source of GTV and revenue for us.

It is also a strategic asset, to your point, that is all about creating deeper integration with retailers, being a strategic partner and not just one of the many marketplaces that they sit on. That allows us to be first to market with a lot of capabilities. To give you an example, when we went to retailers and told them, "Hey, it would be really great to implement Snaps together," a lot of retailers want to start by implementing Snap on their own and operated properties, obviously. We do that for them and automatically get that for our marketplace. Similarly, with loyalty integration, when we build loyalty integration for their storefronts, we get that for our marketplace.

It really allows us to have a strategic relationship, be integrated in their IT roadmaps, and really call dibs on these limited IT resources that retailers have and take all of the innovation that we have in enterprise and bring it to marketplace and vice versa, take all of the innovation of marketplace and bring it to enterprise. We feel very strongly about that strategy. That is why it becomes easy then to make acquisitions like Wynshop. Also, if you look at our track record of acquisition, a lot of them have been in the enterprise space, whether that is Caper, FoodStorm, Rosie, Eversight, because these acquisitions directly build on top of a really strong product suite and feed directly into our strategy.

With Wynshop, for example, that is allowing us to power the storefronts for more retailers, go deeper with the ones that we had relationship with. Wakefern is a good example. We have a very strong relationship with them. We already power Kiper in 10% of their stores, but now with Wynshop, we're going to be able to power their storefront as well, as well as develop relationship with new retailers. Patterson is a great example where Wynshop is powering their storefront, and that's allowing us to tap into that relationship. In terms of monetization opportunities, there's obviously the SaaS revenues that Wynshop charges to date, but really the ultimate goal is to upsell to more revenue-generating opportunities, whether that's our fulfillment technologies that retailers are asking for and were available on Wynshop or Carrot Ads.

A lot of Wynshop retailers wanted a retail media solution, and with Carrot Ads, we're going to be able to do that. Kiper is another example that can integrate directly with our storefront to provide an omnichannel experience. We have a lot of opportunities to upsell now, and that means that there are a lot of upcoming synergies that make these acquisitions be a no-brainer.

Bernie McTernan (Senior Analyst)

That's great. Thank you very much for that answer. Just one follow-up. I know that the shareholder layer talks about AOV declines primarily driven by the lower minimum delivery thresholds in restaurants, but I guess just wanted to ask directly if you're seeing any trade-down or smaller basket sizes within the larger basket, any evidence of that on the platform or not?

Emily Reuter (CFO)

Yeah. As we talked about, we saw the 4% on a year-over-year basis decline in AOV, and that was driven by restaurants first and then by the $10 reduction in the minimum basket for IC Plus. What we're actually seeing is that's been slightly offset by a continued increase in sort of the remaining basket. We're seeing continued strength, and that is a result of exactly what you pointed out, which is we're not seeing trade-down. We're seeing this as truly incremental spend. As Fidji talked about, we see that in terms of the types of orders that we're seeing on the platform. Hence why we continue to feel quite good about this update.

Bernie McTernan (Senior Analyst)

Very helpful. Thank you both.

Operator (participant)

Thank you. One moment for our next question. Our next question will come from Deepak Mathivanan of Cantor Fitzgerald. Your line is open to be the next.

Deepak Mathivanan (Managing Director and Senior Internet Research Analyst)

Great. Thanks for taking the question. First, on the small basket orders, you talked about the incrementality of these orders. Are you seeing any common theme on maybe the type of retailers you're seeing these orders go towards, and perhaps that's helping you gain more scale with some of the retailers with fewer SKUs or so? Is there any theme in terms of diversifying the retailer side that you're observing? On Uber Eats, now that you've had it for over six months, can you update on kind of the attach rates, penetration gains you're seeing? How has that also helped Cart's core grocery business in terms of increasing frequency or perhaps new users coming in primarily through the restaurant orders?

Fidji Simo (CEO)

Yes. Thanks for the question. On small baskets, we have not seen really a big difference between retailers that have grown the most from $10 minimum basket. We have seen that be, I would say, pretty widespread. Nothing really specific to call out here. We are seeing that the types of items purchased are more snacks and beverages, fresh vegetables, frozen desserts, alcohol, dairy. Widespread, but still what you would expect from kind of midweek fill-in orders. Feeling really good about the fact that this change created the kind of use case that we were expecting it to create. On your second question on Uber and restaurant adoption, we continue to see restaurant adoption deepen, and there is still lots and lots of runway to go. On average, customers using restaurants order groceries more frequently and spend more on grocery orders than they did prior.

This effect is particularly strong with less frequent and lapsed customers where we obviously have even more room to grow. We're seeing high customer engagement, especially with Instacart Plus members who are really liking the restaurant offering. As we've mentioned in the past, we're seeing larger order values on restaurants on average than on other restaurant platforms, which really reflects the families and the strength we have with families on the platform. We are feeling very good about restaurants. As a reminder, our core hypothesis with restaurants was really that it would reinforce grocery and create a virtuous cycle. We are certainly seeing that with a very, very strong positive impact on grocery.

Deepak Mathivanan (Managing Director and Senior Internet Research Analyst)

Great. Thank you, Fidji.

Operator (participant)

Thank you. One moment for our next question. Our next question will be coming from Shweta Khajuria of Wolfe Research. Your line is open. Excuse me, Shweta, your line is moving forward to our next question. Our next question will come from Mark Zgutowiz of Benchmark. Your line is open, Mark.

Mark Zgutowicz (Equity Research Analyst)

Thank you. Appreciate the questions. Maybe just a follow-up on that last one in terms of restaurants. I'm just curious if you can provide any more color on the type of volume growth you're seeing there and what that trajectory looks like through the balance of the year. I just had one follow-up. Thanks.

Fidji Simo (CEO)

Thanks, Mark. We don't break out restaurants from the rest of the trends in particular because of what I explained just now, which is that a big part of the reason why we entered this market and this partnership is because we assumed that it was going to also increase consumption of grocery. That's certainly what we're seeing with increased order frequency in grocery, increased GTV coming from grocery. The two are really deeply intertwined. For that reason, we don't plan on communicating about them separately because we really run it as one business, and that's the way we look at the business internally.

Mark Zgutowicz (Equity Research Analyst)

Okay. Fair enough.

Emily Reuter (CFO)

Yeah. Sorry, I could just add one comment there, which is just as a reminder, it did launch in June of last year. We think there's continued runway for growth, but in terms of contribution to overall growth, I would think it sort of moderates in the back half of the year.

Mark Zgutowicz (Equity Research Analyst)

That's helpful. Thank you. In terms of the, I guess, indirect impacts from the affordability initiatives that you're putting in place, obviously, this is more of an optics question given the higher order density that is coming about. In terms of the declines in AOV that you saw in the quarter as well as transaction revenue, is that trajectory—should we expect the trajectories of both those items to continue to decline a bit here through the year as that sort of filters through your model, or are we kind of looking at a new baseline, maybe just looking at AOV today? Is that a new baseline to sort of look at maybe flatlining here for a little while? Thanks.

Emily Reuter (CFO)

Sure. We can talk about AOV to start. As we talked about, we did have the impact in terms of year-over-year, sorry, from both a combination of restaurants as well as the $10 minimum. I think that's important to think about just in terms of the launch of restaurants really rolled out in the latter part of Q2 of last year. I think the impact there, I expect to have a slightly more dampened impact as we move through the remainder of the year. The $10 minimum, obviously, launched somewhat more recently. Though that said, we have seen strong uptake from our existing customers where I think the impact is more pronounced.

Overall, I think I do expect on a year-over-year basis, you probably have some similar impact as we go into Q2 and not commenting much more as we think about the rest of the year. From a transaction revenue standpoint, we've been sort of steady at about 7.1 on a quarter-over-quarter basis. Though if you go back over the last couple of quarters, I think we've been pretty consistent in terms of saying that we do expect to see fluctuations in transaction revenue. We're very much within our long-term range of where we expect transaction revenue to be. There are a number of things that go on within transaction revenue that can land us up or down 10 or 20 basis points. You have seen that a bit throughout the last year.

Some of those things are on the downward pressure side, things like investing in the $10 minimum, investing in affordability, so things like value meals and things like free pickup last year. On the positive side, you've seen us drive a greater amount of leverage from, as an example, our shopper efficiencies becoming much more efficient in terms of our batch rates and our ability to get the shopper through the store. There is a number of different offsets there. Again, I think we've been happy with where we are. We've been pretty consistently in the low sevens, and we do expect sort of some continued variability there on an ongoing basis.

Mark Zgutowicz (Equity Research Analyst)

Super helpful. Thank you.

Operator (participant)

Our next question will be coming from Andrew Boone, Citizens. Your line is open, Andrew.

Andrew Boone (Senior Equity Analyst)

Thanks so much for taking the question. I'd love to ask about partners for Carrot Ads and your guys' momentum there. Uber Eats was clearly a big sign-in. Can you guys just talk about what is causing that momentum in the business, what you guys are seeing, and maybe how do you think about the positioning against kind of the competitive sets that's out there? Emily, this may be a more difficult question, but if I think about the demand generation that you guys are doing through promotions, through sales and marketing, can you maybe just compare that versus last year or two years ago and talk to the efficiency of what you guys are seeing on demand? Do you think your position is improving, deteriorating? How do you think about that? Thanks so much.

Fidji Simo (CEO)

I'll take the Carrot Ads question first. We are very pleased with the momentum. Obviously, Uber Eats picking us was very exciting, and that really builds on the momentum we have had with Thrive, Hy-Vee, Sprouts, Schnucks, and at this point, more than 220 partners signing up for Carrot Ads. It is really a combination of two things. One is that we have superior ad technology, and that is in big part because we have had to build this ad technology for our own marketplace. We have had to optimize it and prove it on our own marketplace. Therefore, what we bring to our Carrot Ads retailers is the ad tech that we have built for ourselves and that has really worked for ourselves.

That is really important because if you're building ad technology without a consumer property like the Instacart app to validate it on, you're going to build ad technology that's less strong, and that's really what we're seeing in the market. The second thing we're seeing is that we have demand from 7,000 brands in our system. That means that when we go to retailers and offer to have them join the Carrot Ads network, we arrive with very meaningful demand that we can bring to them from day one and add to their profitability really overnight. That is creating at the end a virtuous cycle, as I was saying, where the more scale you have with more retailers joining you, the more demand you have from brands, and the more demand you have from brands, the more retailers want to work with you.

We're really in that kind of virtuous part of the cycle where we're seeing that accelerate, and we're very excited about what we're seeing. When you think about position versus competitors, it's really the same thing. It's like the ad tech is superior, the demand is superior, and therefore, we're just signing on more retailers.

Emily Reuter (CFO)

Great. I can jump in on the question on demand generation. I think the way that I think about it, you talked about two years ago, a year ago, I think there has been an evolution in terms of how we think about our portfolio of spend. You highlighted, I think, incentives as an example, but we really think about not just incentives, but the overall portfolio of where can we spend to drive everything from top of funnel brand awareness. You saw that with us leaning into new channels like the Super Bowl this year, and we were very pleased with the impact that that had on brand awareness down through the funnel all the way to incentives.

That was an example of something you saw us really talk about and lean into last year as we got a lot more efficient and effective at deploying much more targeted incentives to be able to drive specific behaviors that we knew were going to drive retentive behavior over time. That continues to evolve. As we talked about a couple of things earlier on the call, like lowering our minimum basket size, some of the investments in pricing. I think about these as all parts of the same portfolio of do we think that investing in $10 minimum basket is more or less efficient than the last dollar of paid marketing spend? If we think the answer is yes, then we shift those dollars. I think that we are continually getting more effective and efficient at doing that.

In terms of our sort of regular way marketing spend, I think as we continue to drive increases in LTV of our customers, that's allowed us to continue to deploy more dollars. We definitely see greater efficiencies at our sort of what we call evergreen marketing. That said, we are also constantly experimenting with new types of spend to see what works. If we see something working, those are the types of things that we lean into. We spend more. If something does not work, we'll cut it pretty quickly. You'll see us continue to experiment and try to get better every day.

Mark Zgutowicz (Equity Research Analyst)

Great. Thank you.

Operator (participant)

Thank you. Our next question will be coming from Eric Sheridan of Goldman Sachs. Eric, your line is.

Eric Sheridan (Managing Director)

Thanks so much for taking the questions. Maybe two, if I could. Fidji, one of the questions we continue to get from investors is elements of either household income skew or frequency skew among your existing customer base and how cyclical or not that customer base might be on the commerce side if there was a slowdown in the economy. We'd love to get any views you have philosophically on stress testing the existing behavior on the platform and how it might arc or change in different consumer behaviors. For Emily, a similar question.

If the economy were to slow down, how do you guys as a company think about what investments you might want to make that are more fixed in nature because you don't want to miss out on the broader long-term growth opportunity relative to where there might be some flexibility in your investment priorities looking out over the next six to nine months? Thank you.

Fidji Simo (CEO)

Thanks, Eric. We obviously look very closely at household composition. When we look at the US market versus our demographic splits, we actually very much mirror the US market in terms of household income and in terms of urbanicity. That was not the case many years ago. Many years ago, grocery delivery was more of a luxury service, and it skewed more higher income. Given all of the things that we have put in place, whether that is rolling out SNAP, everything we have done on affordability, we have actually gotten to the point where we pretty closely match the US market at this point. We are seeing that the product-market fit, even with lower-income audiences, is very strong. When I attend focus groups with lower-income audiences, what we see is that these people sometimes are trying to pack two jobs in one day.

They are very time-starving, and grocery delivery is a huge benefit. A lot of these people sometimes do not have a vehicle. Again, that is a huge benefit to have access to grocery delivery. That is why we see that people who are using SNAP dollars to buy on Instacart also use their own dollars to buy on Instacart, which is a strong proof that there is product-market fit beyond just spending the money that they get from the program. When we look at the macro and how resilient we can be, I touched on that in my introduction, but I think groceries are an essential thing. It is not a discretionary thing. Grocery delivery is fundamentally all about convenience, and we do not think convenience is going away. Looking back at end of 2022, early 2023, when grocery inflation was very high, our business was resilient.

We saw prices increase on the platform as much as inflation, but AOV increased not as much as inflation because people tend to shop on a budget. That means that when prices go up, they might remove an item from the cart and buy maybe one fewer item, but they still try to kind of maximize our budget. What we're seeing is that that's giving us a lot of resilience when people have kind of one budget in mind that they're always looking to spend. I will acknowledge, though, that to accelerate grocery adoption, having lower prices is always better, and that's why we continue to lean into affordability, no doubt about that. We feel very well equipped to navigate the macro no matter what comes.

Emily Reuter (CFO)

Great. Thanks for the question, Eric. To answer the question on if the economy were to slow down, I think a couple of thoughts here. First of all, very happy that we're starting from a very strong position. We have an incredibly strong balance sheet, and we feel like we're in a very good position to be able to weather all scenarios. The other thing that I'd point out is that obviously we operate profitably today, and that gives us a lot of flexibility regardless of outcomes to be able to manage the business. Going a click deeper there, the first thing I'd point to is that the good news is that we do have a lot of what I'll call fast-twitch levers that we control.

On a short-term basis, we can adjust depending on the market scenarios. Obviously, what we try to do really, to your point on competition and sort of where do you want to invest for the long term, what we try to do is really look at our ability to drive long-term profitable growth. To the extent we see those opportunities is to continue to invest against them. We have that discretion to be able to pull back on a short-term basis. Obviously, if there were a more dramatic turn, we have other levers at our disposal that are a bit more sort of medium-term in nature. I think the last thing I'll say is that we obviously continue to drive a lot of efficiencies across the business regardless of the macroeconomic environment. Luckily, to date, we actually haven't seen any signs of a weaker consumer.

We feel quite good about how we've been able to operate and think we have quite a bit of flexibility in all types of environments.

Operator (participant)

Thank you. Our next question will be coming from Lee Harrowitt of Deutsche Bank. Lee, your line is up.

Lee Harrowitt (Co-Head Internet Equity Research)

Great. Thanks for taking the question. A couple of just price and gas and price parity online relative to in-store. I guess, do you have any sense or can you give us maybe some high-level numbers about sort of where that stands across your network? Maybe relatedly, are you seeing any softness amongst the stores that don't have price parity more recently, perhaps an indication within those stores consumers are looking for any affordability? Maybe just through the cycle, can you envision a world where, to the extent that the economy slows, maybe foot traffic into grocery stores slows a little bit, you guys become a more strategic partner and could perhaps drive a greater adoption of price parity online in order to sort of drive those volumes that they need against sort of a fixed cost base? Any help across those three would be great.

Thanks so much.

Fidji Simo (CEO)

Yeah, thank you. We continue to see price parity retailers grow faster than the retailers who are not at price parity. That has been a trend for a while, and it certainly continues. In terms of adoption of price parity, we continue to make progress. We talked about Schnucks and Heritage Grocers last quarter. We went to price parity with Lowe's this quarter. We continue to make progress, but it's not black and white, meaning that in the past, we were really thinking about either a grocer being totally at price parity or totally marking up. Really, right now, what we're seeing more is a much more nuanced and granular strategy where some retailers go to price parity only on the products in their flyers. Some grocers go to price parity on the products that are really daily essentials for customers that really set price perception.

Some grocers go to price parity for customers that are part of their loyalty program. It is really a multi-pronged affordability strategy, and grocers really modulate that based on the market environment, based on their profitability goals, based on what they are seeing among the consumer. They all have a very different strategy. We see our role as giving them the tools like our Riverside software to make the best possible pricing decisions for their particular objectives and also showing them very clearly the type of market share that they could gain if they made some pricing changes. To your point on having a fixed cost base, if grocers win or lose one point of market share in the future because of the move to online, that can have a really disproportionate impact on their earnings.

Our job is to really put that in context and show them that, yes, going to price parity might impact their earnings negatively short-term, but it might actually impact their earnings very positively long-term if that allows them to capture market share that would have otherwise gone to a competitor. That is a complex strategic decision that they have to make and we're there with them every step of the way to help them make the right one.

Colin Sebastian (Managing Director and Senior Equity Research Analyst of Internet and Digital Media)

Awesome. Thank you.

Operator (participant)

Our next question will be coming from Jason Helfstein of Oppenheimer. Your line is open, Jason.

Jason Helfstein (Managing Director of Head of Internet Research)

Thanks for taking the question. First one, can you talk about storefront pro adoption levels and what you're doing to drive higher adoption? You obviously alluded to that retailers that use that spend get more yield out of it. Then, Fidji, I just want to confirm when you were answering the prior question about, I think it was Andrew's question about advertising, you were basically referring to what drove the kind of the upside in advertising in the quarter, and you were referring to, I think, both more spend and the flywheel of more advertising and more spend for advertisers. If that was not the answer to that question, just try to understand what drove kind of the strength in the advertising in the quarter. Do not repeat if that was the answer. Thank you.

Fidji Simo (CEO)

No, no. All good. Thank you. On storefront, in terms of adoption, we have more than 600 retail banners now using storefronts. As I mentioned, we're really excited about that because what we're seeing is that as retailers lean more and more into online adoption and making all of their customers omnichannel, they are naturally leaning into promoting their own and operated properties more than they would lean into promoting a marketplace. We benefit from their investments by powering their own properties. That allows us to capture a large and growing part of the market and also strengthen our marketplace in the process. We are excited about that. We continue to power Costco's own and operated side, Kroger for fulfillment, and lots of other snacks, products, etc. We feel very good about our enterprise solutions.

On ads, I don't know exactly which question you are referring to, but I'll just answer your question on what drives strength in Q1. I would say it's really the combination of the entire strategy working. We are seeing very high performance of our ads. We are leading in performance both in terms of ROAS and CTR amongst multi-retailer ad platforms, and that's attracting more budget both across large brands and emerging brands. We're seeing strength in both segments in Q1. As a result of that additional demand, that's allowing us to attract more supply because more retailers want to work with us on Carrot Ads. Because we have more supply, we end up getting better performance and more demand. That is the virtuous cycle I was referring to that we're really seeing at work and particularly strong in Q1.

Operator (participant)

Thank you. Our next question is a follow-up from Shweta Khajuria of Wolfe Research. Your line is open.

Shweta Khajuria (Managing Director)

Can you hear me?

Fidji Simo (CEO)

Yes.

Shweta Khajuria (Managing Director)

Oh, I apologize about the prior technical issue. My question is on advertising revenue. It's a follow-up on one of the prior questions already. When you speak with advertisers about forward spend or commitment, I'm assuming they're viewing you as bottom-of-the-funnel sort of spend bucket. What is top of mind for them ahead of what's going on? Do you fall under performance spend for them? Does that give you some level of confidence as we think about perhaps the next few months ahead? Thank you.

Fidji Simo (CEO)

Yes, thanks for the question. We feel very good about our ability to attract more than our fair share of ad dollars under any macroeconomic conditions. That is exactly for the reason you mentioned. We are a very performance-driven platform. We have very high performance, as I mentioned. For that reason, even in a context where advertisers might be a little bit more uncertain about the macro in general, they usually decide to focus their dollars on a platform that can drive that performance and can do that at scale. That is why the fact that we are a one-stop shop, that we operate across not just our property, but also more than 220 other retailer websites and really act as an aggregator for retail media, gives us a lot of advantages in this market where brands are going to look for a few at-scale high-performing partners.

That's really what we're hearing. In terms of the feedback on the macro, I want to be clear that we have unsurprisingly heard caution, but it is not drastic nor widespread. It's really in pockets, and it's brands staring at not just tariffs, but also other potential regulations, whether there could be changes to SNAP eligibility, changes to regulations around which ingredients and food dyes are allowed, and more broadly, changes to consumer behavior in general. We are seeing, for example, a move from sugary cereals to high-protein yogurt. We're seeing moves from alcohol to non-alcoholic beverages from younger audiences. Across all of these changes, that's creating a more complex environment for brands to navigate. Within that, they are always looking for the same thing: performance and scale.

To the extent that we deliver both, which we have proven that we can, we think that we're incredibly well-positioned to navigate the next year.

Shweta Khajuria (Managing Director)

Okay. Thank you, Fidji. That was very helpful.

Fidji Simo (CEO)

Thank you.

Operator (participant)

One moment for our next question. Our next question will be coming from Justin Patterson of KeyBank. That will be our last question. Your line is open.

Miles Jakubiak (Associate Analyst of Equity Research)

Great. Thanks for taking the question. This is Miles Jakubiak for Justin. Just a couple of quick ones. First, to follow up on universal campaigns. I know it's still early, but just curious if there's any early learnings you can share with that product and maybe any characteristics of the brands that are adopting that product. A similar question on Smart Shop. Just curious, since you launched this suite of tools, if you've seen any changes in consumer behavior around this, whether it's with basket sizes or purchase conversion or anything around that, would be helpful. Thanks.

Fidji Simo (CEO)

Of course. We recently announced our AI-powered universal campaigns, and the goal is really to let our brands of all sizes create one campaign with a single budget that automatically optimizes across multiple ad formats in real time. It's still really early, so I don't have specific results to share, but I will echo what I said earlier, which is that emerging brands in particular are very likely to benefit disproportionately from something like that because it really gives them the ability to set up one campaign and let us optimize across ad formats and ad placement based on their goal and really optimize for the right budget allocation for them, whereas large brands sometimes prefer having a little bit more control over that. When piloting universal campaigns, we saw a brand like Rescue Dog Wines saw a big increase in new-to-brand sales.

We saw a brand like First Form, which is nutrition supplements, so very significant sales leads and really good ROAS. We feel very good about how this is working. On Smart Shop, to make sure everyone understands, this was our launch that was really about personalizing the experience even further so that we would understand your implicit preferences. For example, if your family is eating low carb or if you have any sort of preference, in fact, 70% of customers have at least one dietary preference. With Smart Shop, we're better able to understand that and then match you to products that match that preference with 30 new health tags that we are applying to about 500,000 products. That is allowing us to create an experience that is stickier and more relevant, and we're seeing that just more broadly whenever we do more personalization changes.

I think there's still a long way to go because we still hear that people who prefer going to the grocery store instead of shopping online often do that because they discover more new things at the grocery store. I think that online, we should be so much better positioned to personalize the experience and make them discover new products that they wouldn't have discovered before. We are seeing that not just with Smart Shop, but also with AI pairings where we pair an item with a complementary item. This is something that we offer on 75% of marketplace orders, and that is driving higher retention, especially among new users who benefit most from this support when they're building their carts for the first few times.

Really bullish on personalization in general, and that's one more way in which we're going to convince more people to move their shopping online because it's going to be such a much better experience.

Miles Jakubiak (Associate Analyst of Equity Research)

Great. Thank you.

Fidji Simo (CEO)

Thank you.

Operator (participant)

This concludes today's conference call. Thank you for participating. You may now disconnect.