Shopify rolls out ‘Shopping on Instagram’ feature, will let merchants leverage Instagram to boost their sales
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Shopify merchants are in luck. Today, over half a million eCommerce Stores use Shopify’s innovative technology package to power their online businesses. Shopping on Instagram or Instagram Shopping accomplishes one of the most critical tasks in improving e-commerce performance: it makes it easier to buy.
Along the same, Shopify has announced the rollout of Shopping on Instagram feature to thousands of merchants, in anticipation of the upcoming holiday sales season. Announcing the news through a blog post, the company said:
With this exciting feature, Instagram will join Shopify’s sales channels to help merchants grow their business on mobile, alongside Facebook, Messenger, Pinterest, Buzzfeed, Houzz, and more.
The feature has actually been available since earlier. The program is still limited and only merchants selected by both Shopify and Instagram will be able to participate in the program — however, the scope has certainly been widened.
Social media has always been known as a marketing channel that induces impulse sales. And even in that category, Instagram certainly comes out on top. Instagram Shopping is a feature that allows businesses to seamlessly sell products featured within their images with just the tap of a button.
After all, many a merchant has made their fortune on Instagram by way of carefully snapped pictures. And Shopify and Instagram’s latest joint venture appears to be an attempt to build upon the same.
The integration isn’t particularly surprising though. Shopify has a similar arrangement with Facebook which allows the purchase of products from within posts. Merchants will now be able to emulate the Facebook selling experience on Instagram as well.
This lets them make any new Instagram post shoppable by easily tagging it with any of their Shopify products, right from inside the Instagram app.
Expanding for the Holidays On Instagram Shopping:
The feature has been available to a slew of selected merchants like xKarla, Gymshark, and Diff Eyewear. It appears as if the testing has been successful, prompting a wider launch right before the festive season.
For now, though, merchants who will be able to access the feature will still be curated by Shopify and Instagram. The companies will probably go for older, proven merchants with image friendly products. However, we can expect them to go for an unsupervised public roll out in the near future as well.
Meanwhile, Instagram is mainly used over mobile — which again begs the question, exactly how important is mobile shopping going to be in the upcoming future? Well, if reports and researches by industry giants like Business Insider can be believed, more people access the web through mobile as compared to the web. And it won’t be long before the statistics are emulated for online shopping as well. In simpler terms, it is likely that Instagram shopping through mobile will take over shopping with computers.
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