Instagram has become one of the most powerful marketing tools in 2021, which has helped drive sales to various e-commerce stores, with over 1 billion monthly users. It’s also the third most visited social media platform in the world, it’s not surprising that a lot of e-commerce businesses makeover 6, 7, or more figures just on Instagram.
In an effort for Instagram to bring and keep people on their platform while satisfying their needs, they improved the app with features that helps drive traffic and complete sales while on the app without having to leave the platform.
I have compiled 8 features that Instagram has added in order to drive sales easily for business owners while making it easy for buyers to complete a sale.
#1 Instagram Feature That Helps Drive Sales To An E-commerce Store – Instagram Shop
The Instagram shop is one powerful feature on Instagram that gives business owners an opportunity to showcase their products to new and existing customers without leaving Instagram.
On an Instagram page, the Instagram shop can be accessed by the “view shop” button. All Instagram pages with Instagram shops are featured on the Instagram shop tab. In this tab, you can browse different shops, explore editors’ picks, shop collections and explore guides.
Instagram shop feature is only available for verified businesses located in the US.
#2 Instagram Feature That Helps Drive Sales To An E-commerce Store – Linkin.bio
Linkin.bio by Later is another powerful and effective marketing tool that helps increase traffic, conversion, and sales while tracking the behavior that drove each sale in order to scale your business.
The traditional Instagram profile only allows you to put one link in your bio, while linkin.bio offers you the opportunity to convert every product on your Instagram page to a clickable image.
Using linkin.bio turns your Instagram into a mini-website, where a potential buyer can click on a product on the Instagram post and pay for it. It also provides you with analytics so that you can monitor what actions or post drove more sales so that you can know how to scale your business.
Linkin.bio also gives you the opportunity to link your Shopify store in order to just simplify the process of showcasing and selling your products to your customers.
#3 Instagram Feature That Helps Drive Sales To An E-commerce Store – Instagram feed post shopping
Instagram feed post-shopping is another key feature that drives more sales in your e-commerce store. Instagram feed shopping is where pages with Instagram shops can get featured for greater visibility.
While using Instagram shopping, you can tag the products featured on your Instagram shop to your Instagram feed, Instagram stories, reels, guides, IGTV stories, or live broadcasts.
So, for example, if you have a post with a lady wearing brown boots with blue shorts, a white t-shirt, and a brown hat, you can tag each of those products on that post, so that if a potential buyer clicks on the post, the price of each of those products appear and it can be bought right there at the shop or the buyer can be lead to your website.
#4 Instagram Feature That Helps Drive Sales To An E-commerce Store – Instagram Guides
Instagram guides are a great way to promote your products. The Instagram guide is a place where you can create and find tips and recommendations for places, posts, and products.
There are 3 types of guides
A)Post guide: provide recommendation about posts
B)Places guide : provide recommendation about places
C)Product guide : provide recommendation about products
Product guides as you can guess is where you can promote your products by creating a list, recommending products in your niche.
As a business owner, you will be creating a lot of contents, so, also check out, Top 3 Tools For Content Creation On Social Media , to make creating contents easy.
#5 Instagram Feature That Helps Drive Sales To An E-commerce Store – Instagram Stories
Instagram stories are another powerful feature that can drive a lot of traffic and sales. Instagram stories have the advantage of reaching not just your followers but also non-followers that interact with similar pages to yours. This helps you to grow the number of your followers, build your brand and influence and gain trust in your brand.
If you have Instagram shop enabled on your page, you can add shoppable product stickers on your stories that people can click in order to buy your product or you can add “swipe up” to any web link if you have up to 10,000 followers on Instagram.
These feature helps to effectively drive traffic and sales on your Instagram page from both your followers and visitors because stories have a greater reach than Instagram posts.
#6 Instagram Feature That Helps Drive Sales To An E-commerce Store – IGTV and Instagram Reels Shopping
IGTV and Instagram reels are powerful features recently added to Instagram which helps to drive engagement from your followers using video content. You can now click on “view product” in order to learn more about the product, save it or buy it.
According to Instagram, there will soon be a feature where creators can tag brand products on the reel, which will be a big game-changer, as it will make it even easier for your followers to buy from you.
#7 Instagram Feature That Helps Drive Sales To An E-commerce Store – Shopping from Creators
Creators here refers to approved brand partners like influencers or celebrities, so “shopping from creators” is a feature where approved creators can tag products directly on their posts for potential buyers to click on the “view product” button in order to learn more about it, save it or buy it.
This feature is only available for businesses with Instagram shops or very popular creators and Instagram is constantly improving its platform, so in the future, this feature may be extended to other types of Instagram account.
#8 Instagram Feature That Helps Drive Sales To An E-commerce Store – Instagram Live Shopping
Instagram live shopping is another effective way to drive sales during your Instagram live show.
This feature is only available on Instagram business accounts with Instagram checkout enabled, where you can tag up to 30 products listed on your Facebook shop.
So, during a live broadcast, you can pin one product at a time in order to drive the sales of that product as this makes it easy for viewers to easily buy the product during the broadcast.
Conclusion
Instagram has helped to create a smooth and effective shopping experience for both buyers and business owners. Let’s recap the 8 features that Instagram has incorporated in order to achieve this.
1)Instagram shop
2)Linkin.bio
3)Instagram feed post shopping
4)Instagram guides
5)Instagram stories
6)IGTV and Instagram reels shopping
7)Shopping from creators
8)Instagram Live shopping
Comment below if you have any other questions and I will reply swiftly, you can also share your experience if you are a business on Instagram using any of these features.