The news: Instacart added Foot Locker, Kids Foot Locker and Champs Sports to its marketplace on Tuesday. Orders ship from more than 1,000 US stores in as fast as an hour, with no markup on store prices, the companies said.
Foot Locker joined DoorDash in March from nearly 1,300 locations and Uber Eats in July from more than 1,000. The same stores now feed all three apps.
Foot Locker built no delivery network for any of this. Instead, it rents demand and drivers from three platforms, and its stores fill the orders.
Its new owner has worked this way since 2020. Dick’s Sporting Goods, which closed its roughly $2.4 billion Foot Locker purchase last September, listed on Instacart in December 2020 and on DoorDash in 2022.
The pattern: Three specialty chains completed the full DoorDash, Uber Eats and Instacart set in the past year.
Foot Locker: DoorDash in March, Uber Eats in July, Instacart on Tuesday.
Academy has explained why it lists on all three. “Our research shows there is minimal overlap between the customer bases for each of these services,” CEO Steve Lawrence told investors in June.
Tractor Supply joined Instacart in July from more than 2,400 stores. Instacart’s second-quarter results named Ace, Tractor Supply and World Market as recent no-markup launches, and the marketplace now counts more than 2,200 retail banners across nearly 100,000 stores.
How it works: “No markups” means the app price matches the shelf price, so the retailer pays the platform’s fee out of its margin. On top of the fee, the retailer carries the store labor to pick and hand off each order.
Instacart does not disclose per-retailer rates. Its transaction revenue ran at 7.2% of gross transaction value in the second quarter, on $10.4 billion of GTV, up 14%.
CEO Chris Rogers told analysts that no-markup retailers “grow more than 10 points faster on average and they retain better.”
Returns go back through the store. Foot Locker items bought through DoorDash “must be returned in-store within 45 days,” according to the March release, and none of the three platforms runs reverse pickup for retail.
The counter: The largest retailers chose to own the network instead.
Walmart and DoorDash ended their delivery arrangement in 2022, and Walmart now runs its own Spark driver network and sells that capacity through GoLocal.
Target owns Shipt, whose CEO says next-day delivery from stores cuts Target’s cost per package by about $2.50 against national carriers.
Dollar General runs same-day delivery from more than 18,000 stores itself.
Tractor Supply does both: Instacart for everyday orders, and its own 375-hub, AI-routed fleet for feed, shavings and fence panels.
What’s unclear: Neither company said who picks a Foot Locker order, store staff or Instacart’s gig shoppers, or how back-room stock by shoe size stays in sync across three apps.
None of the three chains has said what share of orders the apps carry. Foot Locker’s own same-day delivery page still named only DoorDash two days after the Instacart launch.
What’s next: Dick’s reports second quarter results on Tuesday before the market opens, its first readout since Foot Locker completed the set. The quarter closed before the Instacart listing went live.
Instacart guided third-quarter GTV to $10.3 billion to $10.55 billion.
