BigCommerce has today confirmed that, in partnership with Instagram, it will be enabling support for sales through the social media platform. Instagram’s shopping feature has been in testing for nearly a year now, with the company initially launching the feature in November of last year, albeit to a limited number of companies. Now, though, it appears the social network is hoping to cash in on the feature’s potential by opening it up to one of the leading e-commerce platforms.
The sales platform caters to thousands of different businesses, both big and small, who will now be some of the first companies to have access to Instagram’s feature. As part of it, brands will be able to tag products within posts with information such as pricing, availability, and descriptions. Users, on the other hand, will be able to discover, browse and shop any products without needing to leave the app. If a user chooses to make a purchase, the Instagram app will then redirect the user to the business’s BigCommerce store through the in-app browser. Considering Instagram has over 800 million users as of last month, of which 80 percent are estimated to follow at least one business account, the audience that BigCommerce businesses will now have access to is certainly huge and could prove to be a key factor in growing their brands. In terms of how Instagram itself benefits from the platform, it appears the company will not charge a commission for products purchased through its app and will instead focus on charging businesses for displaying their products and posts to users who are yet to follow them, be it in the form of a traditional post or an Instagram Story.
The benefits of Instagram’s shopping feature, alongside the detailed statistics that a business account offers, is sure to attract a number of users. After all, not only can companies track how best to spend their money on advertising, but now they can also sell their products through the platform by simply tagging them. Recently it was reported that the number of business users that used its platform had doubled since March to over 2 million, but by opening itself up to such a large e-commerce platform, the number of business users could easily skyrocket over the course of the next year, something that would please parent company Facebook. For now, though, it remains to be seen how the next generation of businesses takes to Instagram’s new offerings.