Instagram is looking for a lot of innovative ways to improve the user experience. One of them is the IG Shopping App. Instagram is working on a standalone shopping app that will help the business or brands sell their products really easily. The name of the app will be ‘IG Shopping app.’
This will let the users browse the required collection of goods from brands and business that they follow. The users can directly purchase the goods from the app itself, this is according to the two people who are familiar with this matter.
We don’t have any data on when the IG Shopping App is expected to launch or when it will be released. The app is still under development, and there is a chance that it might even be canceled before it will get released. But the sources familiar with its development says that Instagram believes that the proper market for this app is well positioned and will make a major expansion into e-commerce.
IG Business
There are well more than 25 million businesses that are already active on Instagram, and almost 2 million of them are advertisers. Facebook Chief Operating Officer Sheryl Sandberg said that “Four out of five Instagram users follow at least one brand/business they admire and want to buy their products”.
This standalone IG Shopping App will allow the business/brand to provide a dedicated connection for an increasingly popular activity on Instagram while also expanding opportunities for the growth of its revenue.
Over time, Instagram could introduce more tools for merchants who are building their businesses on their platform. Which will directly challenge the e-commerce platforms like Shopify, according to a person familiar with the company’s thinking. Most online businesses need an Instagram account, as it is a good source for online marketing; most of them would surely use paid Instagram business tools if it became available.
Some companies already sell such business tools to Instagram advertisers. For example, let’s take Forty Six. It lets businesses pay for help creating shopable content moderation, photo galleries, post scheduling, and other services. Shopify’s app store contains dozens of plugins related to and managing and promoting Instagram-based businesses.
Instagram began testing this shopping feature back in November in 2016. They rolled it out more broadly in March of this year. Companies can tag posts with individual products, allowing users to shop directly from photos. Instagram is currently testing a feature that lets users shop from Instagram stories.
Verdict
Shopping would not be the first Instagram feature that will be coming out as a standalone app. More importantly, the company has been testing Direct, a new messaging app, since last December. In June it introduced IGTV, a YouTube competitor that puts vertical shot videos into their own app.
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