As with other platforms, on Instagram you can not only publish photos, stories and reels, you can also use the social network to sell products and thus obtain extra income. And the best of all is that it is not complicated at all. This is all you need to know to start selling on Instagram .
What is Instagram Shopping
Instagram Shopping is a feature that the platform implemented some time ago and whose purpose is to allow brands to create a digital catalog of their products. In this way, the users of the platform can buy them without having to leave the social network and not even have to go to an external website. Although there is also the option of using it only as a showcase and finalizing the payment on the corresponding brand page.
Be that as it may, the truth is that taking advantage of this Instagram option can be very attractive and is a source of extra income or a way to boost the ones you already receive through the sales channels in which you usually move.
Therefore, if you are interested or think that you could take advantage of the platform to sell, we are going to explain the process step by step. This way you will be able to carry out both the process of setting up your store on Instagram as well as knowing some particularities of it and its operation.
How to create your store on Instagram
The first step to be able to sell on Instagram is to see if the Instagram Shopping option is active in your country. This is something that you can easily check from the Instagram support page, but still, here is the list of countries according to their continent:
- North America: Canada and the United States
- Latin America: Argentina, Belize, Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Costa Rica, Ecuador, El Salvador, Guadeloupe, Guatemala, Guyana, French Guiana, Martinique, Mexico, Panama, Paraguay, Peru, Puerto Rico, Dominican Republic, Suriname, Uruguay and Venezuela
- Europe, Middle East and Africa: Germany, Saudi Arabia, Algeria, Armenia, Austria, Belgium, Bulgaria, Cameroon, Cyprus, Ivory Coast, Croatia, Denmark, Egypt, United Arab Emirates, Slovakia, Slovenia, Spain, Estonia, Finland, France, Georgia, Ghana, Greece, Hungary, Ireland, Israel, Italy, Kenya, Latvia, Lebanon, Lithuania, Luxembourg, Malta, Morocco, Mayotte, Moldova, Norway, Netherlands, Poland, Portugal, United Kingdom, Czech Republic, Reunion , Romania, Serbia, South Africa, Sweden, Switzerland, Tunisia and Turkey
- Asia-Pacific region: Australia, Bangladesh, Burma, Korea, the Philippines, Hong Kong, Indonesia, Japan, Kazakhstan, Laos, Malaysia, Mongolia, Nepal, New Zealand, Singapore, Sri Lanka, Thailand, and Taiwan
If your country or place of residence is within this list, the next step is to create your store having made sure that the product you are going to sell is a physical product. For other types of sales such as info-products, guides, courses, etc., you will have to resort to other options or do it in a much more manual way.
Next, to create your store on Instagram, the first step is that your profile belongs to a company profile. So you just have to change it from personal or professional to the latter mode, which is the one created for this type of activity among other things. The step by step would be the following:
- Start Instagram and configure your account as a company in Settings> Account> Switch to account …
- Now, see Edit Profile and connect or create a new Facebook page. This is essential to be able to have a store on Instagram. By the way, the experiences connected between both networks will also be activated.
- The next step is to start uploading your products to Facebook Commerce Manager . To do this, create a catalog and add the different products with your photograph, purchase link, price, etc. This process can be done one by one or in bulk through the different options that you will find
- Now go back to your profile and in Settings> Creator> Configure “Shopping on Instagram” click to open your store on Instagram
- Follow the instructions that the application gives you to select the page that you have created on Facebook with the store and / or product catalog that you want to sell. If you are going to use a platform like Shopify, Magento, BigCommerce or WooCommerce you will have to connect your accounts
- Once this entire process is done, Instagram will verify that the data is correct and if so, it will activate your store within the platform
- When you have passed the review process, you can start creating publications where you can tag the products you sell
From now on, when you make a publication in the feed and users see it, they will also have access through these tags to the purchase option. A purchase that, according to each country, may or may not be completed within the platform itself. However, in the worst case, the only thing that will happen is that they will have to go to your website or payment platform to close the transaction.
Posts, stories, shopping guides and more on Instagram
Once you have your store active on Instagram, you can use practically all the content publication options to sell your products, for example:
- You can create posts in the feed by tagging the products that appear in it
- Also upload stories and through the shopping sticker add the option to redirect the user to the product to get it
- Another option is Instagram Live Shopping and it allows you to make a live presentation while offering a purchase link on the screen
- Finally, there are the Instagram shopping guides, an option that is inside the + icon
All these options help to give greater visibility to your products and thus achieve higher sales. Although there are basic aspects that help to improve the numbers and they are practically the same by which the platform itself is governed. That is, the publications must be attractive and with quality images that encourage purchase, the information in text must also be clear and remove any product that you no longer work to avoid possible confusion.
Ready, with all this and although it may seem a bit confusing at the beginning you can start selling on Instagram and even take advantage of the work to also do it through Facebook due to that own integration as both belong to Mark Zuckerberg.
