How to Set up an Instagram Shop in Armenia? - Part 1

Many of you might have noticed the small shopping bag icon on the photos of products uploaded by brands to their Instagram pages. After tapping the photo, you can view the prices and labels of the products featured. You can even jump to the website right from the Instagram page. This tool is called Instagram Shop. And here comes the most interesting news: it has already become available in Armenia. Let's discover what opportunities an Instagram Shop offers and why it is important to have one for your brand.

 

What is an Instagram Shop?

 

An Instagram Shop allows you to integrate your product catalog with your Instagram profile. This feature lets you promote your brand products directly to Instagram users through regular posts, Instagram stories, in the Explore tab and in a special Shop tab featured on your profile. 

When you activate Instagram Shop for your brand, your customers will get the chance of viewing your products without leaving the Instagram app. One of the most amazing features of Instagram Shop is that you can tag your products in photos just the way you tag your friends in your group photos. This action adds a small shopping bag icon to the corner of the photo and places it in your Instagram Shop. 

You can tag up to 5 products in an image and up to 20 products per carousel. Any time you tag a product in a photo, that content will appear in an exclusive shopping feed on your Instagram business profile. And here comes another important fact: you can even promote your products in Instagram stories. The sad part is the product stickers are available to businesses located in a limited number of countries. If you are located in one of the markets on the list, you can freely use the shopping stickers.

Instagram Shop product pages introduce the users with any information they might want to know before purchasing it. The information includes:

 

• The name of the product

• The price of the product

• Product images

• Product description

• A link to the product on the website

• Related products 

 

3 Key Benefits to Setting up an Instagram Shop

 

As you might have noticed, Instagram is becoming a widely famous e-commerce powerhouse. The founder of kids apparel brand Spearmint Love, Shari Lott, experienced the benefits of launching an Instagram Shop. She mentioned that after launching the Instagram Shop they experienced a 25% increase in traffic and an 8% increase in revenue. And all these statistics were related to the brand's Instagram Shop. Despite this, the Instagram shop has other advantages as well. It:

 

• Makes shopping easier for customers

 

There is lots of noise around and online platforms are not an exception. With numerous businesses competing for acquiring customers’ attention it might be really difficult to make people visit your store. Yeah, right, people are lazy. The solution is, instead of "forcing" them to come to you, take your store to them. For this, setting up an Instagram Shop is the best ultimate solution for you.

Instagram Shop decreases the unpleasant friction of the purchasing process by making it easier for your customers to look through your catalog, check product information and prices. 

 

An important note: your customers can jump from your Instagram Shop to your web page with just one tap.

 

Further, your customers can even save the product they liked and come back later. Instagram Shop has further improved the shopping experience by allowing shop visitors to choose from various sizes, articles and colors, proceed to payment and all these without leaving the app.

Seems like Facebook has taken any step to improve only your customers' experience. But you're wrong. After your customers place their first order, their information including name, email address, billing information and shipping address is saved in Facebook's database, and guess what? You can use this information to push notifications about processing and delivery of your customers’ orders. This helps to improve their experience and further secures the relationship with your customers.

 

• Helps to directly promote products  

 

Depending on the type of your business, Instagram could serve as the best tool for connecting with your target audience and deepen customer loyalty. The saddest part is that there is only one place you can insert a clickable link, and that is your profile. 

 

An important note: you can add only one clickable link in your bio.

 

As you cannot add clickable links to your post description, and it makes it very difficult to promote individual products. The most vivid example of this is pointing your customers to the link in your brand's bio. Such an approach hurts your customer conversion rate which results in low sales. 

In fact, you can update the link in your profile any time after posting a new piece of content, but think about the previous posts that no longer carry the link to your store? Here is where Instagram Shop comes to help. Instagram Shop allows you to integrate all your Instagram product posts with your store. Now you can freely promote your products without annoying your followers by asking them to click on the link in your bio. Instagram Shop is a clean and simple option for showcasing your products without affecting user experience. Instagram puts it this way, “Once a business has a product catalog connected to their account, tagging a product is as simple as tagging a person in a post.”

 

• Exposes your products to users with high purchase intent 

 

One of the most amazing features of Instagram Shop is that once you tag a product in your post, that post will appear in the Shopping Explore tab. If you implement the right strategy for increasing Instagram engagement, let's say by optimizing your hashtags, you can easily contribute to your post's reach in the Shopping Explore tab.

Even more, you will get the chance to expose your products to your target audience, as the shopping posts are personalized and based on users' past engagement and general interests. The fact is, your products get a higher chance of being sold in the Shopping Explore tab, as users wandering there have a high purchase intent.

 

Instagram marketing is essential to any kind of e-commerce business's marketing. Just look at the statistics. More than 500 million Instagram users use the platform daily and 50% of them follow at least one brand. Sounds compelling, right? Then think for a while why should you refrain from captivating Instagram's audience and directing them to your Instagram Shop? Being it an introduction of a new feature or an update of the interface, you better promote your Instagram business account or you'll be left behind your competitors. Seems like Instagram has become one of the most effective tools for closing a sale, doesn't it? If you have decided to start an Instagram shop, follow the link to the article on our blog with an easy step-by-step guide of how to set up an Instagram shop. One more thing: in case you need professional help, contact the Digital Factory team.