Over the last few years, there’s been a huge increase in ‘Social Shops’ – think of it as Social Media meets eCommerce.
They’ve taken over our social feeds, with Instagram and Pinterest being two of the social platforms currently leading the way with these engaging in-app tools for promotion, all linked through the power of photo and video.
Join us for our 2-part guide as we share our top tips and advice for setting up your very own Instagram and Pinterest shops, so you can have the power to sell and share your brand story!
First up, it’s part 1.
Let’s start with Instagram Shop Setup.
Steps For A Simple Set Up
Before you get going with the Instagram Shop setup, check if creating an Instagram Shop is a right fit for your business. It’s not a one-size-fits-all. You’ll need to make sure that you are a business that sells physical products for direct purchase from your business’s website and owns and represents the shop or website associated with the domain provided.
You’ll then need to review Instagram’s Commerce Eligibility Requirements and check to see if you are in a supported market. Once you’ve completed that, you’ll also need to confirm that your Instagram profile is a business or creator account.
Now you’re at the point where you can go ahead and connect it to your Facebook Page and this is essential. If you don’t have one already, this would be the point to set up a Business Manager account – you’ll be needing one of these so that you can set up and run your Instagram shop in Commerce Manager.
Now you’re one step closer to getting your Instagram shop live – once in Commerce Manager, it’s time to get down to all the nitty gritty details. You’ll be asked to fill in your shop details – including checkout methods, sales channels, and your all-important product catalogue of items that you wish to showcase in your Instagram Shop. Some websites do also have an automatic feed available.
Make Note: Currently, direct checkout on Instagram is only available to eligible US business and creator accounts, so if this isn’t you – you can set up your shop to checkout on your own website. Hopefully one day soon us UK based accounts will be able to take advantage of this key feature.
Finally, make sure to go through and review your shop details and then once you are ready, you can go ahead and submit it to Instagram for review! In our experience whilst supporting clients with this set-up, it took a couple of days to hear back from Instagram. But you can hear back within just few hours or up to 2 weeks in some cases.
Instagram Shop Lingo
Now… whilst your shop is in review, this is your chance to get to know some of the key Instagram Shop lingo that you’ll be seeing a lot of.
Visitors to your Instagram shop will be able to browse through your products and explore tailored collections.
Product Detail Pages provide all the important information about your products from your product catalogue, such as pricing and descriptions.
Collections let you customise your shop by curating products into themes, such as seasonal, current trends, new stock or different budgets to suit each customer. You can design how this all appears for your shop visitors in Commerce Manager.
Key Instagram Shoppable Features
People can shop your products throughout Instagram with ease with several key organic shoppable features, including the below.
Product Tags enable businesses to highlight products from their catalogue and help customers to learn more about what they’re selling through engaging feed posts, interactive Instagram Stories and Instagram Live and Instagram Video.
When Instagram users see your shoppable post, they can tap the image to view product details – making it a seamless user journey.
The Shop Button is displayed on shoppable posts with a little white shopping bag icon. When users scroll through their feed, and come across your shoppable post, they will see a ‘Tap to View Products’ pop-up appear, users will then be able to click on this and view your product in your shop.
Make Note: There can be multiple products tagged in one image, perfect if your visual content is showcasing more than one item.
Instagram Shopping is a powerful feature and one that is only getting stronger with time. We hope you’ve found this blog useful.
If you ever decide to dabble in the world of Instagram shops, just give us a shout. We’d be more than happy to help support you with the Instagram shop setup and management process!
Stay tuned for our part 2 of this blog, where we’ll be talking all about Pinterest shops and the steps for a stress free set up experience!
Rachael Dines, Director, Shake It Up Creative
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