Online customer experience today revolves around the customised space that each user creates for themselves. All the online browsing habits, list of the accounts you follow, tags, trends, and ideas that you resonate with come together to form your own virtual world.
Having multi-channel ways to sell online as a business is necessary for this context. Knowing how to use your brand’s voice to make potential customers relate to you also takes multi-valent skills. But you, as a store owner, are also a customer for someone else, and e-commerce platforms work hard to give you the best experience in running your businesses.
Such an example is the way e-commerce software (online stores) uses social media platforms for its marketing strategy, and how social media generates a product by linking individuals to the brands they love.
So, if you think of your online presence as a whole, then you quickly understand that integrating your Instagram account with your Shopify store will greatly benefit your business and help you grow.
But, how do you do that?
Stick around to learn more about how to sell on Instagram.
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Why Should You Create a Shoppable Instagram Account?
The numbers speak for themselves.
Instagram has over one billion users and 90% of them follow at least one business account. Customers nowadays prefer to find everything in one place and the social media profile makes it easy for them to scroll through posts or stories and shop the products they are interested in without much effort.
The fact that you can link your Shopify account and tag your products in your Instagram stories or posts makes it very convenient for users to buy something they like with just a few clicks. And, once the visitor buys something from your product tags, you have already established a relationship with them, or you’re about to.
Instagram lets you look closer into what potential customers like, enables you to interact with them directly and associate with similar brands, or even create a back and forth exchange between two or more of your own shops. The Shopify software (online store builder) enables you to organise products and set the preferred payment options. It’s one of the most user-friendly website editors for online retail out there.
Is Your Instagram Account Eligible to Support the Shopping Option?
Before you start the process of linking your Instagram account to your Shopify store, please make sure that your Instagram page is eligible for Instagram Shopping. There are a few rules that you need to comply with if you want to connect Shopify to your Instagram and start selling.
Your page must comply with Facebook’s policies (since Facebook bought Instagram;)
Your page must represent your business, so you can’t use your personal account for it to work. If you don’t have an Instagram Business profile already, it’s time to update to one. You can start a free trial if you are not convinced that you want promotion through social media;
Be trustworthy: this might mean that you already established a follower base.
If you have any questions regarding your eligibility, you can just contact the support team at Instagram to see what could be improved for your page to be accepted.
How to Do a Full Shopify Integration on Instagram?
If all the previous research shows that you are ready to use the Instagram Shopping function, then you can go ahead and configure the integration.
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Set a Facebook Shop
Even if it feels like an extra step you have to link your account to Facebook to set up Instagram Shopping. We don’t see any disadvantage in having an active Facebook shop, except for some extra time needed to put it in place.
The brilliant thing is that the Shopify platform makes it easy for you – as it does with numerous steps of the e-commerce practice. You can set a Facebook shop from your Shopify dashboard. If you already have a Facebook business page, you don’t even have to wait anymore.
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Connect Instagram to Facebook
You will have to connect your Facebook page to Instagram. As you can see, these first steps will already be skipped if you have already created your brand presence on these social networks. In the Setting Menu, select your product catalogue.
In order to keep the shoppable pages within the terms of their policy, Instagram takes the time to review every submitted page before allowing it to tag products. So you can expect to wait a bit, but it’s only a matter of a couple of days.
In the meantime, you can take the time to evaluate your website’s optimisation, from website domain names, themes, and so on.
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Add Instagram as a Sales Channel on Shopify
Now that Instagram has given you the green light to sell your stuff on the network, you have to configure the page in the Shopify dashboard. You can link the Instagram page to your shop by adding it to the “Add sales channel” section. Adding an Instagram sales channel is incredibly easy and fast.
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Start Tagging!
Now the fun part begins. You can finally start tagging your products on Instagram and see what reactions you get from the audience. To tag your products, press the “Share” button on one of your posts or story, and select the products you want to include in it, and the order you want them to be shown. Add an interesting call to action description and wait.
Each photo can contain up to 5 product tags, while carousel posts can contain up to 20 products.
Your Instagram followers and visitors can browse through your feed and click on the product tags to see more details about them. They can make the payment directly through the app, which makes them more likely to make a purchase.
Want to Make the Best Out of Your Instagram Shopping?
If you are interested in knowing more about best practices on social media used for e-commerce, be sure to contact us and tell us more about your audience, what you sell and what you’re hoping to achieve in the future.
Our Shopify Website Development experts at Australian Internet Advertising are ready to audit your social media presence and bring those conversion rates up through simple, budget-friendly practices.
