The Instagram Checkout & How Facebook Has Upped The Influencer Game

At Facebook’s annual F8 developer conference on April 30th ’19, they announced that Instagram users will be able to shop directly from the posts of creators. Users will no longer have to leave the app in order to buy a product they see in their favourite influencer’s feed or stories, making transactions easier and uniting the world of social and commerce.

Back in March, Facebook had already rolled out the new “checkout” feature for a select few brands which allowed them to sell products directly from their feeds. The “Shopping from Creators” feature will also only be available to a select few individuals, including the likes of Gigi Hadid and the Kardashian-Jenner clan. Creators and influencers will only be able to tag brands that are part of the Instagram Checkout beta for the time being.

Why is this important and what does it mean for you? Well, as an Instagram user, you’ll be able to find new products and make in-app purchases, reducing the steps it takes from discovering an item to buying it. No longer will you have to exit the platform to scour a website searching for those pair of shoes or the latest gadget that your favourite creator shared on their feed.

Image: Instagram

For brands, you have a new way to reach an audience that is already engaged and is actively looking to influencers and creators for inspiration. Instagram as a platform has become the place to go for users to find new things from the brands they love and might not have heard of yet. It’s all about discovery, so making it easier for users to shop a brand’s products is only going to improve the overall user experience and increase your conversions.

This new feature will also be highly beneficial from an analytics perspective. Previously, it was difficult to measure the success of an influencer marketing campaign that promotes a specific product. Without links or providing a coupon code, running multiple campaigns at once could cause a lot of issues when it came to analysing traffic and conversions. Shoppable posts mean that brands, influencers and creators will be able to see the exact number of sales or clicks a post generates. Influencers will actually be able to measure their influence. This will be extremely valuable when it comes to developing campaigns and choosing the right creators to work with.

This new update proves that the world of ecommerce is changing fast. Perhaps in the future, individual brand websites will disappear, and all online shopping will be through the use of apps and social media? Whatever the case, we’ll be all over it.