You can soon shop on Instagram

Each post by a brand has a picture of the product and also displays the price of the item on a single tap

Instagram is now testing shopping products through its posts. Just like instant articles, where one can read news articles without leaving Facebook, users can buy products without leaving Instagram.

Each post by a brand has a picture of the product and also displays the price of the item on a single tap. The 'Tap to view' option which upon clicking shows you a bigger image of the product with description about it. Instagram showcases up to five products and can be purchased from the website by tapping the shop now icon.

Instagram said a survey found that vast majority of purchases take a day or longer, with only 21% of purchases made within a day. This means users take their time, compare it with other products and then take a call on the item. Keeping this in mind, Instagram plans to provide an option to save the post and revisit again.

In the initial phase, the new features will be available to a group of people on iOS devices within the US. To test the functionality of the new feature Instagram has partnered with 20 US-based retail brands including Kate Spade, JackThreads and Warby Parker.

Kate Spade from Instagram for Business on Vimeo.

If everything works for Instagram, with more than 500 million monthly active users, it can grab a significant digital ad revenue from big brands. Facebook's ad revenue stood at $5,201 in Q1. Read more.

 

Promising a seamless user experience

With e-commerce players in India wooing buyers by offering  heavy discounts, delivering a superlative consumer experience to time strapped and low on loyalty consumers is becoming all the more critical from the word ‘go’. Also, chances are higher that unlike a brick and mortar store where an unsatisfied customer tends to move on to a different store to pick up the brand that she desires, the same customer facing glitches on an e-commerce website will not think twice before hopping on to a competitor’s website. Recognising, this key behavioural pattern of consumers, e-commerce players are investing heavily in improving the user interface (UI) and user experience (UX) for consumers.

For instance, Jabong launched a new user-centric and responsive-designed app/website in August 2015. It launched the user-centric new design across front-ends, be it web, mobile web or apps. The base architecture of separate front-end and service-oriented architecture helps it in launching apps for new form factors like mobile and tablet, and all kinds of internet of things devices. The move has seen the online fashion retailer’s conversion rate going up by 12 per cent, meanwhile its bounce rate has gone down by almost 16 per cent.