Instagram Shopping Feed? It Depends

Joseph Priest
Sep 7, 2018 · 2 min read

One of social media’s innovations that we have only gained a small taste of so far is how it may change the shopping experience. Although Pinterest has become a de facto shopping social media site, it remains to be seen how the trajectories of other social media sites will develop as far as shopping. This was touched on this week in an article in Social Media Today, “Instagram’s Looking to Launch a Standalone App for Online Shopping,” and it spotlights how Instagram may take consumer shopping to a new level.

As the title of the article describes, Instagram is considering creating an app that lets people browse goods from their favorite brands and purchase them directly through the app. As a social media strategy, this move poses several benefits and drawbacks.

The benefits of establishing a new shopping app include, first, that it would enable Instagram to maximize the potential of shopping within the Instagram format without risking the current and familiar Instagram user experience. This separate-app strategy also reflects some of Facebook’s recent learnings from Messenger. Facebook has been focusing on monetizing Messenger by adding new functionality, including bots and shopping tools, but that focus hasn’t yet produced the results that Facebook hoped for, and the former head of Messenger admitted that the app had become too cluttered and needed fine-tuning.

A second benefit is that the article speculates that presumably a separate channel would allow merchants additional options to link to their Instagram shopping channels from their Instagram posts. This would provide another benefit because currently Instagram users can only link to their own website through their Instagram profile and in Stories, for eligible brands. This option could prove a huge lure for brands already working to build an Instagram following.

The drawbacks to creating a separate app for shopping are considerable, however. Namely, it would require already loyal and acculturated Instagram users to add and set up a new app, and then establish new routines and behaviors for using that app.

Moreover, if the separate app for shopping were successful, another drawback would be the risk of having users of that app not return to use Instagram, or at least not at their previous level of usage. In this way, a new shopping app could cannibalize Instagram while still only generating a modest number of new Instagram shopping app users.

In sum, with Pinterest succeeding so well as a shopping app and being used for shopping by 66% of social media users now, there’s seemingly a huge opportunity for other social media sites to tap into this market. But the pros and cons are ones that Instagram should weigh carefully.

Joseph Priest

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PR editor and writer for 20+ years. Uses serial commas; detests the word “issue”; abbreviates “microphone” as “mike.” Got a language question? Bring it on.