Instagram launches new in-app shopping feature

What is the new feature?

The social giant Instagram has launched a new in-app shopping feature. The feature provides the opportunity for brands to add links to posts navigating back to their e-commerce store. Currently, only 21% of purchases are completed within a day of viewing a post, after learning this, Instagram decided to take action and help businesses achieve a higher conversion rate via the platform. The process of purchasing a product has been reimagined and simplified to enhance the overall shopping experience for users. This new approach ensures a dramatically shortened customer journey from product discovery to product purchase. As well as shortening the customer journey, merging the social and shopping experience together gives a more organic feel to the purchasing process. Instagram believes this is the most logical step for the platform to take in order to catapult their business users into the future.

The new product tags, in particular, are a great way to showcase your products in a visually and engaging way for your customers.

Shopping on Instagram is now available in the following countries:

• Australia
• Brazil
• Canada
• France
• Germany
• Italy
• Spain
• United Kingdom
• United States

Since 6th October 2010, when Instagram first began the social platform has risen to new heights, amassing a huge user base of 800M, alongside 500M daily users and 2M advertisers. Many businesses, no matter the size, have praised the platform for enabling them to achieve their digital marketing goals including; brand awareness, advertising and building a target audience.

Instagram first launched the in-app shopping feature back in 2016 exclusively for the US. The women’s fashion brand, Natori, saw an increase in traffic via Instagram by 1,416%. The company noted that the new feature allowed them to showcase their products in an authentic way, enhancing the seamless shopping experience the social platform set out to achieve.

How to use it?

Before you begin, in order to start using the shoppable tags on Instagram posts, you need to ensure that your businesses inventory is pushed through via its Facebook business account. Once the inventory has been successfully imported the “shopping Instagram toggle” should appear within the app enabling the ability to include shopping tags each time you upload a new post.

Below, are steps that should be followed in order to successfully add product tags to your Instagram posts.

1. You will need to upload an image and include any filters or captions as if you were uploading a normal post.
2. The share screen will now feature the option “Tag Product”, which should be tapped on if you wish to add the product tags.
3. Select the part of the image which your product features in.
4. Start typing the name of the product and select it when it displays in the search results.
5. Repeat for any other products which may feature in the image.
6. Select Done once all the product tags are in place and, of course, share the post.

Instagram Shopping allows users to add up to 5 products tags for each photo, for multi-image posts, the limit is 20 product tags. Have lots of amazing posts that receive lots of engagement already? Don’t panic, product tags can be added after an image has been posted. Instagram has notified its users that there are currently exceptions to where the product tags can be applied, including videos, boomerangs, animated GIFs.

What about the future?

It’s an exciting new era for the social platform, as the ecommerce industry continues to grow it’s exciting to see how much additional revenue can be generated by utilizing different digital channels.

Is it all good? Well, we are a little bias but Instagrams newest feature can only work for businesses that stock physical goods. The feature is still in its early stages of being rolled out so we should expect to see an expanded version of the feature which will incorporate other business needs.

So what does this all mean?

The new feature introduced by Instagram back in 2016 definitely presents new opportunities to catapult the platform into the ecommerce industry. Integrating users shopping experience with their social experience without any major disruption when interacting with the app will ensure they continue to move in this direction. Instagram has already started rolling out the feature across 8 new markets including the U.K. after receiving glowing feedback from its initial launch in the US market. Overall, it’s clear, this new shopping feature isn’t only beneficial to businesses but to end users and customers, businesses can easily showcase their products to potential customers and users can easily purchase them. It has certainly introduced a ground breaking new way to shop via social media and we can’t wait to see what the future has in store.

Here at First Internet, we offer a wide range of SEO services. We have a lot of experience with websites of all sizes, so if you’re looking for help regarding social media marketing contact us on 0161 941 5330.