29 Apr What Brands Need to Know About Instagram’s Checkout Feature
On this week’s edition of Ignite Your Week, our focus is on Instagram’s new in-app checkout feature. Although it’s still in beta testing, what we have heard is that Instagram expects to make about 10 billion dollars on this feature. Great for them, but what does that mean for brands? Will this really be worth the brand’s investment?
Instagram’s Checkout Feature
We don’t know a whole lot yet, but, here’s what we do know. According to a Facebook study, 80% of consumers either research, decide to buy or discover new products and services on Instagram. So, there definitely seems to be a market for this feature. Also, we think that brands will be less likely to lose customers because we’re not sending customers off the channel to make the purchase, they’re doing it right in line.
Read more about on Best Practices for Instagram.
Watch Outs for Brands
So the flip side is three things, right? The cost per transaction, someone will have to be responsible for paying Instagram for these transactions, we’re assuming it will be the brand. Also, there are Facebook privacy issues, those have not gone away, as we are all aware, and consumers will need to be comfortable sharing information like credit card information and other personal information. So, that’s something that Instagram and Facebook will need to kind of think about and get over to make this worthwhile for the brand.
Lastly, loss of data visibility, if Facebook and Instagram do not have the data that is worth sharing, or in a shareable format that brands can use, it may not be worth the brand’s time to really go this route. All that said, this is still in beta testing, so we’re not saying don’t do it, but what we are saying is that it’s probably important for brand’s right now to think about and weigh the pros and cons of this. Think about this as part of your strategy, it’s not too soon, and if you need help, we’re here to help you with that.
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