The Christmas Holiday season is just around the corner! One of the favorite seasons for Christmas shoppers. But this is also an interesting time of the year for e-commerce businesses, who have also been waiting impatiently for their products to get sold out. You’ve probably been able to notice the increasing amount of social media campaigns coming up on your social feeds and promoting various product deals & discounts, especially on Instagram. Just in time for the holiday, social platforms are now making Christmas shopping even easier with a lot of brand new features available. Instagram has recently announced the release of three new features that are making it easier for brands to sell their products and for their followers to buy them through their interface.
We know most of the shoppers on Instagram are tech-savvy and usually visit the social platform to find the latest trends and styles. If you’re a long time Instagram user, you probably remember having to visit the brand’s website to find the information (name & price) of the item you liked. You’d lose patience if you couldn’t find it in less than three clicks, and when it came to the payment part, you still needed to go to your desktop. Since people are proactively finding new products from brands they love every day, Instagram decided to expand their shopping features not only to make it easier for their users to discover their favorite brand products but also for Instagram to see this as a strategic opportunity to aggressively expand their e-commerce arm.
Here’s the list of those new features:
1. Shopping Collection
With Instagram’s new Shopping Collection feature, you can check the items’ name & price displayed on the picture by simply clicking on the shopping bag icon. You can save it to your shopping collection to revisit later by simply tapping the product tag in the brand’s Stories or Feed and click on the Save icon. It will create your Shopping Collection automatically. Once you’ve decided this is an item you’d like to buy for yourself or someone else, head directly to the brand’s website and get it shipped to your house!
And this is how your Shopping Collection looks like once you’ve selected all of the items you’re interested in!
2. Shop tab on Business profiles
Instagram has been working on the redesign of their Shop tab for business profiles, which is a great way for users to browse all the products from your favorite brands on Instagram. The social platform hasn’t said much publicly about this update, but it becomes clear that Instagram sees the retail industry as a big opportunity to significantly expand its e-commerce capabilities and the new features indicate that this is just the beginning.
3. Shopping through video feeds
With this new feature, you will be able to shop not only through your favorite brands’ pictures but also from videos. As Instagram allows business profiles to put their product tag on their video content, this new option gives you access to the items’ information featured in the video. You can just simply click the shopping icon in the bottom left-hand corner and the product details will appear at the bottom.
To conclude
Instagram has become one of the most engaging social platforms of our time and surely brands cannot ignore its massive popularity and potential. With these new features, the eCommerce industry will find this platform even more appealing for their business.
There are currently more than 25 million businesses on Instagram and most of them are using Instagram as a platform to deliver social media campaigns. According to Salmon, 29% of Millennials in the UK and the US use social media to purchase their favorite brands’ product. Based on that number we can say that Instagram’s potential to become the best platform for eCommerce businesses is infinite.
As a great platform to reach a younger user demographics and continuously evolving by releasing features’ updates, Instagram can unlock innovative ways for users to discover new brands and products.
Source:
Salmon Statistic, The Future Shopper 2018 and beyond. https://bit.ly/2RHs2zR
