In just a few months, the relatively new delivery-based company, Instacart, has continuously doubled its value as a startup, becoming the second-most funded startup company. Between January and October of last year, the company doubled from $7.9 to $17.7 billion. It has now grown from $17.7 billion to a whopping $39 billion in valuation.

The global coronavirus pandemic is the simplest explanation for this phenomenon. Due to lockdown restrictions and fear of crowded spaces, consumers felt more comfortable with a delivery-based service like Instacart to promote social distancing. More retailers can shy away from a traditional in-person shopping environment and instead shift to delivering their products to consumers for both convenience and safety.

Investors can see this trend just through an analysis of the company's decisions throughout the year 2020. Instacart partnered with over 200 new retailers, expanding their frontier to deliver for over 600 companies and a total of 45,000 stores. Additionally, the company has an army of nearly 500,000 freelance delivery drivers.

However, these results are not short-lived. Even in a post-pandemic society, researchers predict that most shoppers will stick to an online and delivery-based shopping experience. However, for many companies that benefited from the coronavirus pandemic, like Zoom, the value of their stock market portfolios decreased with the development of vaccinations. For a company like Zoom, the end of the coronavirus pandemic means returning to an in-person working environment, eliminating the need for virtual conferences.

Instacart is different, however. In studies conducted by Mercastus and Incisive, consumer's trust in online shopping will continue to increase past 2025, after the end of the pandemic. In fact, "Post-pandemic, 90% of e-grocery customers are expected to continue shopping online...just 7% of online grocery shippers said they will return to brick-and-mortar stores". Therefore, Instacart's success is not only explainable by the temporary effects of the global pandemic but by a permanent change in the shopping industry as a whole. Investors are confident that even a world post-pandemic will remain attached to an online shopping experience's convenience and ease-of-use.

Regardless of the pandemic's end, executives at retail companies should maintain their online shipping and delivery options. These enduring partnerships solidify that Instacart is far more than temporarily successful. Instead, they will continue to grow as consumers switch from favoring health and safety for convenience post-pandemic.