Should you get an Instagram shop?
Have you seen posts popping up on your Instagram feed recently with little shopping bag tags attached to them? Or gone on a brand’s profile page and seen a view shop button? You are (rather obviously) looking at Facebook’s new Instagram shop feature.
Instagram shops have been around for a while, but they are only really now gathering real momentum. They’ve gone from being quite a rare thing to see on our feeds to a fairly regular occurrence. Not as regular, though, as I think they’re going to be.
This social media feature looks set to take off in a big way for 2021, as—due to the pandemic—demand for online shopping has increased, but along with it there’s a desire to shop local. Facebook is promoting their use too, possibly because it would like to be seen as a supporter of small businesses, especially right now. It seems the Instagram shop feature ticks all these boxes.
The idea of setting up a shop can be daunting when you read Facebook’s information about it, because they have to cover so many options that it can seem overwhelming or more complicated than it is. Actually, for a small business, if you sell products online then it’s easy to create an Instagram shop. First, you’ll need to set up a Facebook Commerce account. This is very easy to do, just make sure your Instagram and Facebook accounts are linked before you start.
Once you’ve set up your Commerce account, Facebook will need to approve it, but this usually only takes a few minutes. Then you can start adding products to your catalog. As a small business, your easiest option is just to do this manually, uploading a photo, product name, short description, price and website page for each product you want to appear on the shop. You can also add stock amount and variations, meaning that if you sell the same product but with different option—such as alternative colours, sizes, materials or even scents—you can add them as one product rather than uploading the same thing multiple times.
Once you’ve uploaded your catalog you can customise your shop buttons and appearance. To be honest, this doesn’t affect the overall look that much, but is simple and fun to do and there are helpful video tutorials if you get stuck. Then just publish your shop. It will go through an approval process again, a bit longer this time, and then your shop will magically appear on your Instagram profile page. As an added bonus, it will also appear on your Facebook page too!
When you post you’ll now see an additional option on Instagram to tag a product. Facebook will automatically add an option to view similar products to applicable posts, although you can turn this off if you like. Viewers will be able to save items, view your products and link straight through to your website.
Having a Facebook and Instagram shop is free — Facebook monetises it by encouraging you to promote your shopping posts. And of course, they would much rather users were shopping on their platform rather than heading off to another big e-commerce site. It’s also surprisingly simple and filing to do if you’re a small business with limited stock. Even if you do have quite a bit, you don’t need to add everything, or you can just do it gradually.
Having an Instagram shop means you can relax a bit when it comes to knowing the algorithm will pick up on you trying to encourage followers to leave the platform to visit your website. There’s now a Facebook-approved way to make sales within Instagram. Of course, you still want to be careful that not every post you do is a direct selling post. But it really is a great tool and, if your a small business that sells products, I personally can’t think of any reason why you wouldn’t get yourself an Instagram (and Facebook) shop.
Article originally appeared in The Perthshire Magazine. Find the latest issue at: https://www.theperthshiremagazine.com/current-issue