Dear Instagram Seller.
scrolls through Instagram timeline and sees a nice dress
Hmmm. This is lovely.
checks caption
Amina Dress. Available in size 6 to 12. DM for price.
These are the things that go through my mind: Why isn’t there a clear price for this? Does this person want to assess my “worth” before giving me a price? Does this person give different people different prices? What if I can’t afford it?
I have reservations about sellers on Instagram who have a habit of not stating prices in their captions or on the photo of the product being advertised. Those who know me know I talk about this all the time. Imagine going to a store like Shoprite or Walmart and seeing a variety of products without prices. Do you know how stressful it’ll be for both the seller and the buyer to ask the attendant for the price of every item he or she finds interesting? Why not state the price so a prospective buyer knows from the onset if he or she can afford it, to start with.
My cousin sells on Instagram. When she started, I complained because she also had a habit of not including prices in her caption. She explained her reason but I still felt it was stressful and explained why. That has now changed as I see her captions now reflect the price of the advertised item. I also once worked at a company that sold products off Instagram. The MD had asked that we do not include the prices in our captions and one of his reasons was he wanted prospective buyers to start a conversation with us. He however changed his mind when I explained that we’ll only end up using the whole day responding to DMs of “how much is this?” instead of making actual sales.
Let me explain this with the Buyer’s Journey and Buyer Persona.
The Buyer’s Journey is the process a buyer goes through before purchasing a product or service. The 3 typical stages of this journey are Awareness, Consideration and Decision. Understanding this process and your buyer personas (how they behave, in summary) is very critical. Understanding a buyer’s persona, for instance, will let you know that buyers on Instagram typically scan through several pages and platforms before making a purchase decision. If your platform doesn’t provide the information needed to make a decision (usually done in the Consideration and Decision stages), they’ll move to another. As a seller, you want to make the buyer’s journey as short as possible so that a sale is concluded. Do not overcomplicate and lengthen this process by making a prospect have to send a DM and wait (yes, some even waste time replying to their DMs) for your response. Imagine if a buyer had to do this for every Instagram seller that catches their attention.
It’s a different thing if you have a website. Hence, your caption will have “Order via link in bio” or something similar. Instagram has also made this process easy for some sellers who have business pages with the Product Tags feature. It’s also different when you are selling bespoke products. But when you are mass selling, making everyone who’s interested in your product send a DM clogs your DM to start with. And so you spend more than half of the time responding to enquiries on price that may not necessarily lead to a sale instead of concluding a sale.
Dear Instagram seller, please make shopping easy for yourself and your buyers.
