Initially, at least, it seems that Instagram is trying to straddle the line between wringing more value out of its network for brands and retailers and overtly commercializing your feed. It’s a hassle. But not for long. These “shoppable” photos will have a shopping tag next to items to identify the product as available for purchase. Rather than a finished product, Instagram plans to continuing learning from user behavior after the new tools debut, next week.
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Up till now, brands big and small have relied on what were effectively hacks to sell products that appear in their Instagram photos. Browsers can then click an icon at the bottom of the image to purchase it. Now, participating partners can tag up to five items in a post.
While browsing and discovery is easy on mobile, finding more information about the specific products you see isn’t always as simple. Instagram isn’t the only platform interested in becoming a shopping outlet.
Mashable has reached out to Instagram and will update this post if they get back to us.
Facebook-owned Instagram boasts more than 500m monthly active users (80% of which are outside of the US) and some 95m images and videos are uploaded to the platform every day attracting 4.2bn “likes” daily.
“It’s been a little frustrating to us in the past to not be able to have people purchase on Instagram”, Lyons said.
Over the last two years, platforms such as Twitter, Facebook and Pinterest began developing some variation of the “buy button”, a tool that’s created to encourage people to make in-the-moment purchases on social media.
“We’re more in a wait-and-see mode”, she said. The app’s e-commerce ambitions are large-including global expansion and a video version of the product-but they’re starting small.
But it’s easy to see how Instagram could turn this into a money-maker. They don’t feel as intrusive as the buy buttons Facebook and Twitter have tested.
In November of a year ago, Pinterest debuted the ability to zoom in on and select objects in a photo, which they could then search for.
Speaking of the future, there’s a lot more Instagram could do with shopping. Three years ago, Instagram let users capture video instead of just still images.
No and no and no, according to Squires.
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The main problem: shopping hasn’t worked well in social media. He has reported for Advertising Age, Adweek and Direct Marketing News. In 2011, Facebook shut down its daily deals service just four months after launch.
