So you have an eCommerce store and you’re using Instagram of course!
You post pretty regularly and have built up a following. If not, we have a very fun way to gain your first 50 followers without paying a penny!
Your community spends time on your Instagram page. In 2017, Instagram reported users under 25 years of age spend an average of 32 minutes on the platform per day while those over 25 spend 24 minutes on average per day.
What is the problem here? You’ve probably experienced it whether you know it or not.
You have users on your Instagram and if you use Instagram, you know you can’t include any linkable web addresses in photo post captions. You can type them in, but they won’t link anywhere.
Here comes the problem, drumroll! Getting the people who are visiting your page or even just seeing and liking your photo to actually take an action such as buying from you.
Most of your followers don’t typically leave Instagram, so how does it help from a shopping point of view? Up until now, you had to hope people would click the link in your bio or use the “swipe up” feature in your Instagram stories if you have a business page.
You’re feeling it because you put a lot of time into your Instagram. It looks great but you’re not seeing the sales like you should. Does the time you put in make sense in terms of the return on investment?
There’s a new solution.
Instagram just introduced “Shopping with Instagram” this week.
It’s a new feature allowing Instagram to start competing from a sales point of view and apparently a move to boost the amount of businesses building profiles on the platform.
Since it’s a new program in beta, only certain stores have this feature available. We’re about to show you how it all works.
Instagram Shopping is Live
One of the retailers that is able to use Instagram Shopping is Macys.
Step 1: When you click on “Shop” that’s on the main Instagram profile you will be brought to a page of photos you can shop from.
Step 2: You can choose one photo by tapping it with your finger which will lead you to a page like this. By lightly tapping the photo it will display which items in the photo are for sale as seen below.
Step 3: Here are two more examples of a how an Instagram shopping photo might look.
Step 4: When you click on the labels on the items in the photo, it will take you directly to the product page on the eCommerce store.
While this is a huge step and will likely be a positive for sales attributed to Instagram, it is still missing the full checkout right on Instagram.
Since this is a feature that will be rolled out to more business users and is one that should be free to setup, you should definitely take advantage of it!
