Instacart and Chase: What's going on with the partnership credit card?
A New Year brings new challenges. Certainly, this seems to be the case for the Chase-Instacart partnership credit card which disappeared for the new customers to apply. Currently, neither Chase nor Instacart offers you the credit card application process on their website, yet the rest remains unclear. We tried to understand what was happening.
Photo: big4credit.com
If you were to open the famous credit card from Chase and enjoy its generous Instacart benefits, it might be too late now. Or, maybe not… we don’t know. But, as it appears, there might be just a handful of people in the world capable of providing some insights on the question. The best answer to the question of whether the Chase Instacart credit card is still available on the market is apparently - “Not really, maybe, it is classified,” - quoting the classic of postmodern times.
To clarify the situation, we have reached out Instacart support to find out that they wholeheartedly believe the card is there to apply for new customers. Not so different was the response from the Chase’s helpline. The representative carefully guided us through the website - from one webpage to another - only to discover that we card application is indeed not available.
The card’s dedicated website, TheInstacartMastercard.com, leads you directly to the Instacart main webpage without any hint on how to sign-up. Similarly, a specialized webpage at Chase, https://creditcards.chase.com/instacart, only offers a sign-in now.
In short, the card is gone, you cannot apply for it and no one seems to know why. A puzzle, indeed!
Less than three years ago, on July 21, 2022, Chase launched a credit card with Instacart. The Instacart Mastercard offered an unbeatable 5% cashback reward on Instacart purchases made on Instacart.com and the Instacart app. It is also packed with an impressive list of travel and purchase protections.
For many people who already use Instacart to deliver all of their groceries, the card was meant to become the go-to method of payment while providing generous perks that match those found on many premium cards. In the end, Instacart is the leading grocery technology company in North America, and Chase is the largest co-brand card issuer in the U.S., so the card was guaranteed to be competitive, and stay around for a long time.
Chase Instacart credit card is no longer offered to new customers
A recent digital transformation boom, energized by the boost from the global pandemic, has sparked a slate of flashy partnership credit cards. For example, Prime Visa, DoorDash Rewards Mastercard, One Key, just to name a few. Despite the high hopes imposed on such programs, not all of them are as successful as advertised, with banks often suffering substantial financial losses.
In Apple’s partnership with Goldman Sachs & Co, the latter reportedly lost billions of dollars trying to establish a full-service consumer operation around the credit card. Yet the troubles are so dramatic that both businesses decided to part ways after the tech giant had sent a proposal to end their consumer banking partnership with Goldman, as reported in the news.
Another example, Bilt Mastercard causes Wells Fargo to lose as much as $10 million every month. Like Chase Instacart, the Bilt credit card partnership with Wells Fargo has been launched also in 2022. The program boasted the support from big-name backers like Blackstone and Mastercard. According to the WSJ report, “Wells has told Bilt that cardholder behavior isn’t providing a path for profitability.”
It is impossible to sign-up for Chase Instacart now. At Chase website, sign-in only.
Is Instacart about to pull the plug on Chase’s credit card partnership as well? It is the one million dollar question… Very little is known so far, but we will likely learn more about that soon. Hang tight if it is!
If the problem is rather some “technical glitch”, whatever is meant by this, it demonstrates that even large and technologically advanced companies are vulnerable to disruptions not promptly understood, addressed, and communicated to the stakeholders, bringing safety and security concerns to the front line once again.
Disclosure: The information about Chase Instacart’s mysterious disappearance has been independently researched and prepared by big4credit.com. If you have more details on this situation that you want to share with us, don’t hesitate to reach out. We will gladly update our post with the new information. In the end, we all benefit from an improved clarity and transparency.