Social media giant Instagram has again expanded its sales offering, announcing a suite of new features to enhance the platform’s e-commerce capabilities.
The news comes after Instagram in September launched a new shopping tab and reportedly started to build a standalone shopping app.
Instagram has now further expanded its sales offering ahead of the Christmas period, and is set to introduce three new ways for users to shop on the app – signalling the app’s push into commerce.
The launch includes tools to discover new products, shop favourite brands and keep track of shopping inspiration in one place – enabling users to integrate shopping into their time spent on the app.
The new features are good news for retailers ahead of the Christmas seasons – with consumers now able to effortlessly browse and purchase relevant products, and retailers able to showcase more of their products.
The first new feature enables shoppers to save shopping collections on Instagram by tapping a product tag in Stories or Feed, and selecting a save icon on the bottom right corner. Users can then browse these saved items in a separate ‘Shopping collection’ page.
The social giant has also launched a new feature which enables users to quickly view all the products featured on a business profile by tapping on a shop icon to see other products and details of the brand.
The final new feature allows users to shop directly from videos they view in their feed from a particular brand simply by tapping on a shopping icon.
Shoppers can also find out about featured products, and learn more about them through this tool. A touted 90 million accounts per month will be using the app’s basic shopping features.
By Georgia Clark
