Social media platform Instagram has announced that the platform’s IGTV and Reels section is getting support for the Instagram Shopping Service. With this, users can now watch a video and then check out a product in a few steps.
This is not a surprising move given that e-commerce has been a part of the company’s growth strategy. The expansion of shopping services across the Instagram platform comes at a time when holiday season shopping is about to begin in the United States.
Commenting on this development, Instagram Chief Operating Officer Justin Osofsky said: “By bringing shopping to IGTV and Reels, we’re making it easy to shop directly from videos. And in turn, helping sellers share their story, reach customers, and make a living.”
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In the year 2018, Instagram added a personalized Shopping channel in the Explore section, which was later expanded to Shopping tags to Stories. Last year, the company introduced another feature called Checkout, which enables users to directly transact within the app. Recently, the Shop section on Instagram has been redesigned and the service is powered by Facebook Pay.
Instagram saw the potential for shopping in this short-form video content market and it seems that Walmart is also seeing the potential in “social commerce” as it is acquiring a minor stake in TikTok along with Oracle.
While shopping features are now available for IGTV on the Instagram platform, the company says that Reels will get support for the feature “later this year” but as of now, there’s no specific timeline for it.
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