[afarrell]

Niche that you might want to target: splitting grocery delivery.

Why?

In the UK, it is common for grocers like Tesco, ASDA, or Sainsburys which offer grocery delivery to require a £40 minimum for an order. It is quite hard to hit that minimum with a week's worth of groceries and ordering groceries for longer than a week is less useful because meat & veg expires. Therefore, it would be nice to be able to split a grocery delivery with flatmates or with the flat across the hall. There is a coordination challenge here.

It would be nice if I could sign up for an account, my flatmate could sign up for an account, we could link our accounts and then we could add stuff to the same Tesco cart--with a record of who had ordered which groceries and who owes whom when someone hits the "thats enough groceries in the cart. please deliver" button.

[fredley]

In our office we use a shared takeaway system called Seamless. We each submit our order ahead of a cutoff time, pay, then when it arrives each container is individually named so you know what belongs to each person.

Something like this could be really good for shared grocery orders for flat shares, but ideally you'd have buy-in from the grocers, so that the bags are separated and there's no quibbling about who ordered what.

[andrewmunsell]

I always wondered why Instacart never took their Group Carts feature and made it more holistic.

Right now, Instacart lets you create shared "Group Carts" for their grocery delivery, which I use with my girlfriend. But, there's no payment splitting, ability for other people in the shared cart to add items after-the-fact, Instacart Express benefit sharing, or any sort of shared order management abilities.

If Instacart extended the "Group Carts" feature to actual "Group Orders", this would make situations like mine (and also those who use Instacart with roommates) much more convenient and would be similar to how you describe Seamless