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Instagram is launching its Shopping feature for business accounts to eight new countries: Canada, Brazil, the United Kingdom, Germany, France, Italy, Spain and Australia. The photo sharing app first began testing shoppable photo tags in November 2016 before making Shopping on Instagram available to businesses in the United States last year.
Since Instagram doesn’t allow links in captions, Shopping on Instagram is intended to make it easier for brands to drive followers to their e-commerce stores, while ensuring that those users continue spending time in the app before clicking away. Before Instagram launched the feature, several third-party services were created to make posts shoppable and remain popular, including Like2Buy and LikeToKnowIt.
When a post using Shopping for Instagram is tapped, it displays popups with prices and a link to a new page within the app with more information and a “Shop Now” button that directs users to the product on the brand’s own online store. Instagram has said it plans to monetize the feature by allowing business users to display shoppable photos to people who don’t already follow them.
Instagram says about half of its daily active users currently follow an “active shopping business,” and today’s geographic expansion of Shopping for Instagram covers its second-largest market (after the U.S.), Brazil.
In a press statement, Instagram head of business Jim Squires said “People come to Instagram every day to discover and buy products from their favorite businesses. We want to be that seamless experience. Whether it’s a local artisan, florist or clothing store, shopping directly on Instagram has never been easier.”