Tap to Shop: Shopify Stores Can Now Sell on Instagram

Shopify merchants can now turn their Instagram photos into shoppable posts.

The e-commerce platform announced today it’s rolling out Instagram shopping to thousands of select merchants, adding another sales channel for these online sellers to grow their businesses through mobile experiences.

“Discovery is at the heart of the Instagram experience. Together with Shopify, we are enabling new ways to turn discovery into exploration, allowing Instagrammers to find new things from brands they love and businesses to find opportunities to build relationships with these valuable customers,” Instagram said in a release.

Shopify stores are already integrated with Facebook’s product catalog, now this feature has extended to Facebook-owned Instagram. Merchants can connect to the existing store catalog through Instagram, allowing them to make any new post of the photo sharing platform shoppable.

Merchants can begin tagging posts with their Shopify products directly through Instagram, details users can access in an instant by tapping on the photo. Users will then have the option to buy that product on the merchant’s checkout without being redirected to another app.

Unveiled in March, the feature was piloted this year with select merchants . Today’s announcement means the tool is expanding to a limited number of Shopify’s 500,000 merchants. The e-commerce platform intends for a larger roll out in the future after more testing and development.

Instagram’s in-app shopping tool was opened up to U.S. businesses earlier this year after a test run with 20 brands in late 2016. The photo sharing platform reported that 19 per cent of users who tapped on a post with a tagged product ended up clicking “shop now.”