Since last spring, even in Italy you can shop on Instagram. Or rather, you can find things for sale and quickly access the sites that sell them. To make an analogy: if Amazon is like a department store, a place where you go to buy things and find a bit of everything, Instagram has become like the center of a city, where you don't just go to do shopping, but you can see many shiny and attractive shop windows, behind which there are shops, especially fashion.
For a few weeks these windows have also been in the Stories and a new function to find them is being activated in the Explore section: we have put together a small guide to find your way around.
Shopping on Instagram, the basics
The Instagram posts from which you can make purchases are those at the bottom left, within the image in question , have a small icon in the shape of a bag. By touching the image once, a label appears for each item for sale in the photo, on which you can read the names of the products and their price. Touching one of the labels leads to a page, also on Instagram, where there is other information about the product, an image of it, a link to go and buy it on the company's e-commerce site and some suggestions from other posts of the same. company to shop from.
In fact, you don't buy anything through Instagram, because purchases take place on company websites. If they are companies that sell in many countries but have a single profile on Instagram, usually first, before you get to the page of the product you are interested in, you are asked what country you are in, in order to see the availability of the product. and its price correctly. If you want, you never leave the Instagram app, because it also acts as a browser, but if you prefer you can also move to another browser by touching the button that appears at the bottom center.
Companies that want to use Instagram as a showcase for their products must first of all have a Business profile, that is, one of those designed on purpose, with a series of more functions. They must then have made a catalog of their products available to Instagram. For now, companies that use Instagram to present their products are for the most part in fashion. Then there are the design companies: for example, the account of Westwing, a site that sells household items and furniture from various manufacturers, and that of Norman Copenhagen, a Danish furniture brand, publish posts tagged for shopping. .
Why Instagram has become a place to shop
Meanwhile, some data: Instagram in the world has about a billion active users at least once a month, of which 14 million in Italy. Five hundred million users open it at least once a day. 80 percent of people who have a profile on Instagram follow at least one company, and there are 25 million companies that have a business profile on Instagram. So far, more than 90 million users have touched a post with the tag to shop for more information about a product each month.
Over time, those who work at Instagram have noticed that many people used the social network as a fashion magazine, where they look for things to buy or ideas for new combinations of clothes: instead of tearing pages or making ears like you do with magazines, they did screenshots to some posts (or saved them to come back to later, after this feature was added), and also asked about products in the comments. This is why the social network has added functions to make shopping possible through its app.
In general, according to a research by Facebook IQ, the part of Facebook that carries out market surveys for companies, Instagram is a social network highly appreciated by those interested in fashion: on average, fashion-loving users have triple the number of followers of other users follow double the profiles, comment much more and watch more than double the videos of the average user and for longer.
Shopping from Stories and from the Explore section
Since September, the tags for shopping are also available in the Stories, as well as in the posts, but they work the same way. The other new feature introduced last month – and not yet available to all users, but coming soon – is the Shopping channel in the Explore section.
Let's start from the beginning: the Explore section is that part of Instagram that is accessed by tapping the magnifying glass icon at the bottom. It displays an endless stream of posts you might be interested in based on what you usually watch and like on Instagram. At the top, under the search bar, there are several thematic channels, with which you can select a certain type of post to watch: for example, in the Style channel there are posts by fashion brands and fashion bloggers, in the Comics channel, illustrations and tattoos. . There are also Animals, Food and Travel channels, but not only. If you don't already have it, in the coming weeks you will also have a Shopping channel in which only posts with the handbag-shaped icon will be collected. The posts you will see in the Shopping channel will be both those of companies you already follow and those of other brands that may interest you.
