Instagram Expands Shoppable Posts To New Countries

Last year, Instagram made shopping available to businesses in the United States of America, after a testing period started in 2016. This year, Instagram expands shoppable posts to six new countries: Brazil, Canada, United Kingdom, France, Germany, Italy, Spain and Australia.
Instagram doesn’t allow any links in captures, so there were different tools used for shopping on the platform, such as LiketoKnowIt or Like2Buy. But those were third-party apps that are still used in countries that Instagram didn’t implement yet the shopping feature.
This new feature was integrated in order to facilitate the shopping and the traffic driven to e-commerce stores and, at the same time, the users are not obliged to leave the platform before clicking away.

How does Shoppable Posts work?

When the Shopping feature is installed and you want to give details on the price or availability of a product in one of your posts, when a user taps on the specific post, a pop-up showing details on price and a link within the app will display, together with a Shop now button that send the users to the online store where they can buy the product they are interested in.

The next step Instagram is thinking to offer to the feature is the monetization part, which will allow brands to create ad form shoppable posts that display to users that don’t already follow them.
Instagram states that more than a half of their daily users are following an active shopping business, therefore the expansion of the shoppable feature only came naturally and they expanded the feature to the second largest market after the United States, which is Brazil.
Head of business at Instagram, Jim Squires stated that people go to Instagram to see new products and why not, buying them from their favorite businesses. So they are opening the shoppable option to both larger businesses and smaller local ones as well, encouraging them all to use Instagram as a tool for showcasing and selling their products. Brands that already used the feature saw an increase in the sales driven by Instagram’s shoppable organic posts.
We can’t wait to see the feature rolling out to the other countries as well.
How about you? Do you have Instagram shoppable posts in your country? Do you use it?
See also: How to Schedule Your Posts on Instagram?