Instagram: a new shopping app for eCommerce

September began with some very interesting news related to Instagram and the eCommerce world. 

Apparently, Instagram has been developing an independent shopping app for some time, which will allow users of the social network to buy products from their feed, but completing the purchase within the new application and not within the online store of the company that offers the product. 

So far, Instagram had developed the shopping functionality within its own application. This functionality allowed, those business users with more than 10,000 followers, to label the products that were shown in their photos, and the users that made click on the product, to redirect them to the company website to complete the purchase of them. 

What Instagram is working on means a step further: now, users could directly buy those products without leaving the application. 

It is unclear whether the new shopping app for eCommerce would be a for a fee business tool added to the Instagram feed itself, or it would be part of a totally independent application of Instagram, with its own product feed and its integrated checkout process. 

Anyway, this new step by the fashion social network opens up new questions: Will this type of social purchase change the fact of buying online forever? Will we stop buying from online stores to shop exclusively through social networks? Or will it just be a complement to the eCommerce we know today? 

From the beginning, the possibilities of Instagram as a place to sell online were clear. Today, more than 25 million of businesses have profile on Instagram, 2 million of them are advertised on the social network. As if it was not enough, 4 out of 5 Instagram users follow at least one business. 

Given this data, already in 2016 Instagram began to test its new shopping functionality. This functionality was growing in popularity, until March of 2017 when all those businesses with more than 10,000 followers could use it. 

Thanks to this functionality, vendors today can label their products in the photos they publish, add direct links from Instagram Stories to the products of their online store. Also synchronize their available catalog with that which has been uploaded to the online store on Facebook. 

But the final step was still to take. The purchase is still finished, both from Instagram and Facebook, on the merchant's online store. 

So, it is clear that creating an independent environment in which the user can carry out the action of buying online on Instagram, which is the only thing missing to complete an end to end purchase flow, is a great opportunity for Instagram when increasing its income. 

It seems that Instagram has very clear that eCommerce is the future. And for this reason, in addition to work on the creation of this new shopping app for eCommerce, is studying the possibility of starting to produce different business tools that substantially improve the possibilities of selling on the social network by merchants. 

The new shopping app for eCommerce is not the only functionality that Instagram is trying to make into a independent application for intensive use. 

In June 2018 it presented IGTV, an app to create long videos in vertical format and publish them on the social network –remember that Stories have a limited time and the videos are being"cut" – what aims to compete with Youtube. And, since December 2017, is testing Direct, a new messaging application.