Making Instagram Shoppable In the World of E-Commerce

E- commerce is a thriving space which is growing every year. Currently the e-commerce space is dominated by amazon, walmart, and Chinese giants like alibaba and JD.com. Instagram with its one billion users worldwide is planning to enter the online commerce market. The big giants like amazon are going to be endangered if instagram steps into the e-commerce world. As per reports, the new chief of instagram Adam Mosseri is intending to transform the instagram into a sales portal. Facebook owned brand is following into the footsteps of google which announced last may the redesign of its shopping portal which allows users to shop directly from site without being redirected to sellers web portal.

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E-commerce Capability of Instagram

Instagram has 500 million daily active users and about 80 percent of all accounts follow a business profile. The photo sharing platform has become the perfect place to showcase your brand and products.In fact most people search for products on instagram and then take an action like visiting the brand's website or page. Social influencers are tapping into this action taking capability to build their large followers. Instagram has this feature called shoppable posts which enables the users to buy products directly from brand's post.

Instagram stories are another way to drive traffic to e-commerce platforms. These features enable brands to engage followers on the platform and cater to the marketing requirement throughout the world where different users are active at different times of the day. The photo app also launched a direct sales pilot program in March of this year although it was limited to only 20 brands like Zara, Burberry, Nike, Adidas and more with payments being processed using PayPal technology.

Making Instagram Into Sales Portal

Adam Mosseri spoke for the first time in an interview after taking over last October shared his future strategy for the instagram. He plans to tap into the huge influencer base of photo sharing platform and connect the users and sellers thoughtfully dot by dot. He plans to reinvent the platform owned by Facebook and turn it into sales portal. He plans to change instagram to leave its main visual aspect for virtual space to make the decisive leap into e-commerce.

He defended the e-commerce like features on app called shopping bag which enables the user to shop directly on the platform without leaving the app. Although it will take firm some 5-10 years to carve a place for itself in the e-commerce world as its very fragmented right now. The firm will also need time to fully transform into sales venue as there are a lot of other things like infrastructure and agreements with payment service providers to be made in countries they intend to operate in future.

E-commerce world is going through lots of changes and possible entry of Instagram is definitely going to increase the competition. The firms like Amazon need to up their game and maybe plan another strategy because instagram might affect their dominance in e-commerce world.