UK-based e-retailers! You’ll step up your social when you hear this…
Instagram are giving UK online retailers the chance to publish shoppable posts.
Shoppable Instagram posts have been on the horizon for a while. The feature was available to American businesses last year, so it was only a matter of time before they shipped shoppable posts out globally.
With the success of external services such as LIKEtoKNOW.it and LIKEtoB.uy, Instagram have got the ecommerce side of this sorted. Users have a more seamless experience of finding the product to purchase.
So, what does a shoppable post look like? Well, it looks just like any other Instagram post. Except, when you tap it, tagged pop-ups show the prices of products and a ‘Shop now’ link which very conveniently takes the user to the point of purchase on the retailers website. You can tag up to 5 products in a single-image post, or up to 20 in a multi-image post.
Instagram’s a bit of a pain when it comes to links. You can’t link to sites in the captions of organic posts. This could just be their way around it. You can link directly to the point-of-purchase! This is great news for brands who want to drive website traffic through their social media marketing.
For such an aesthetic platform, Instagram are onto a winner with this feature. It’ll be interesting to see how this plays out for different kinds of items. Small ticket items such as clothing and cosmetics will be ideal for this feature, yet items with a larger tag might struggle to cut through. They’ll require a bit more thought than a click on Instagram…
The UK is among seven other countries where shoppable posts are now a feature, the others being Canada, Brazil, Germany, France, Italy, Spain and Australia.
If you’re an online retailer in the UK… you’re gonna need to act on this now! And keep an ear out for when they start monetising this feature. Then, you’ll get to display your shoppable posts to users who don’t follow you. And all it’ll take is a bit of budget.
