‘Checkout on Instagram’ Will Finally Let You Shop on the Platform

Published in

Octoly Magazine

4 min readApr 3, 2019

It’s FINALLY happening. Our inner shopaholics are rejoicing and our bank accounts are none too happy, but you can finally buy things directly from the app on Instagram.

Check out Instagram’s announcement below:

Instagram has had ‘Shopping Tags’ for a while now. However, before, when you clicked on a shopping tag you were sent to the company website, which wasn’t exactly the most seamless user experience. Most people would prefer to stay in the app to shop instead of being forced to leave. This new feature makes shopping tags more intuitive by letting you select and purchase a product directly on the app. See the steps below via Social Media Today:

Now, this is a brand new feature so of course there are some things to keep in mind.

This is a Beta test

Checkout on Instagram is only available to 23 brands right now. This can feel frustrated because so many large and small businesses have waited for this feature to emerge for a long time. But be patient — like most of these new releases, using only a handful of brands helps Instagram work out any kinks early. That way, later adopters can have the best possible experience with the feature.

The app will save your payment information

This is both exciting and a little scary. It is great that the app will save your payment information. That way you don’t have to enter your credit card information every time you want to make an in-app purchase. We can imagine that as this feature becomes more widely available people will be making tons of purchases right within Instagram. However, with the recent security problems Facebook, Instagram’s holding company, has had it is understandable that we are a bit apprehensive about giving away such personal and important information. Hopefully, the app will also roll out some additional security precautions just to be on the safe side.

Yes, you will be able to track your purchases

According to TechCrunch, you will be able to keep track of your order right in the app as well and via your email.

“Merchants will only get the details necessary to fulfill an order, including contact info and address, but not your actual payment info. Users will see an opt-in option to share their email address with the seller for marketing purposes. Checkout with Instagram could leave merchants with a little less data than if the purchase happened on their website, but Instagram says it will provide info on which sales it generates for a merchant.”

Checkout on Instagram is not free for vendors

If you are a company or small business looking to use this app in the future, you should know that it is not free. Vendors will be charged a small fee for each transaction. The exact amount of that fee is currently unknown but we expect that these transaction fees will generate a huge amount of income for Instagram in the future.

How excited are you about this new shopping feature? Have you seen any brands use this feature yet? Let us know in the comments below!

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