Have you ever happened to come across an amazing pair of shoes in your Instagram feed and then fruitlessly spent hours trying to find out where to order them from? Well! You are not the only one. Many of us have found ourselves in similar predicaments. Instagram is now coming up with a feature that could potentially take care of this issue.
On Tuesday, Instagram launched a brand new shopping feature that will let people identify and eventually purchase products they may happen to come across in pictures from different brands in their feeds
According to Vishal Shah, Instagram’s head of product management for monetization,
We’ve seen pretty good progress in mobile on making purchases easier. But these two things — discovery and the actual purchase — are just not well-connected like happens in physical stores.
Till now, the only way one could shop from Instagram was by the links that brands would put in their Instagram bios and adding product information on photo caption. Some brands even use hashtags to highlight images of products that are on sale on their own shopping portals.
Here is how the new feature will work:
- The user will get a “Tap to view products” icon in the lower corner of photos, tapping on will bring up tags next to each product listing the item’s details like its name and price. Another tap will lead to loading a product page inside of Instagram with more information.
- Once the purchase is complete, Instagram will redirect the user to the purchase page on a retailer’s mobile website or app.
- For now there are 20 brands that are collaborating with Instagram. Some of them being Abercrombie, Warby Parker, Kate Spade and Macy’s.
Shah said,
We want to give people tools to make it as easy as possible, but not be in your face.
As of now there has not been any monetary transaction between Instagram and brands which are collaborating with the platform for the new feature. This makes it clear that Instagram isn’t taking a cut for featuring brand products on its feed. However, that may be temporary with the platform moving into take its share once the feature picks up and starts hitting more feeds.
Shah also said that the shopping feature won’t be included in advertisments (for now).
The feature is being broadcasted to a small group of iOS users in the U.S. We can expect the platform to follow up with a wider roll out assuming that its pilot launch yields desirable results.
