And the next frontier for Instagram is likely eCommerce – the platform has already been working on its ‘Shopping Tags’ for posts, and is slowly rolling them out to more businesses. Shopping Tags streamline the product discovery process through the platform, but you still need to tap on a link to a company website in order to make a purchase. That could also be about to change – according to TechCrunch, the platform’s now rolling out a new native payments feature, which lets you register a debit or credit card as part of your profile, and will enable you to buy things without ever leaving the app.
In-stream purchasing would be a big move for Instagram. As per the platform’s own data, over 80% of users already follow a business, with 200 million Instagrammers actively visiting at least one business profile every day. That indicates the size of the potential opportunity – in addition, two-thirds of visits to business profiles on the platform come from people who aren’t following that business. Clearly, product discovery is already prevalent within the app – enabling users to make impulse buys based on that activity will undoubtedly prove popular, and could help give Instagram marketing a significant boost.
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