Instagram’s new shopping bag icon adds e‑commerce element to advertisers’ Stories

Tap­ping the shop­ping bag icon will dis­play more details on the prod­ucts fea­tured on Insta­gram Sto­ries from brands.
Insta­gram is giv­ing a select num­ber of e‑commerce brands a new fea­ture to help with their e‑commerce efforts on the plat­form. Start­ing today, cer­tain adver­tis­ers can add a shop­ping bag icon to their Insta­gram Sto­ries that will dis­play more details about the fea­tured product.

Click­ing on the shop­ping bag icon can dis­play var­i­ous types of prod­uct infor­ma­tion, includ­ing more images of the fea­tured prod­uct, images of oth­er prod­ucts con­tained in the sto­ry, descrip­tions and pric­ing infor­ma­tion for the prod­uct and links that lead direct­ly to the brand’s web­site to pur­chase the product.

The announce­ment says users can shop from “select” brands in Insta­gram Sto­ries, with more com­ing soon, so the shop­ping bag icon does not appear to be avail­able to all adver­tis­ers at this time.

Insta­gram reports 300 mil­lion users take advan­tage of Insta­gram Sto­ries dai­ly. Results from a recent user sur­vey found peo­ple watch Sto­ries to learn more about “… brands they’re inter­est­ed in, get an insid­er view of prod­ucts they like, and find out about new prod­ucts that are rel­e­vant to them.” Accord­ing to the com­pa­ny, 33 per­cent of users said they were more inter­est­ed in a brand or prod­uct after see­ing it on Insta­gram Stories.

Some brands — specif­i­cal­ly direct-to-con­sumer brands — are find­ing more val­ue in Insta­gram Sto­ries ver­sus their Face­book ad cam­paigns, accord­ing to Digi­day. One adver­tis­er report­ed that it was redi­rect­ing ad dol­lars from its Face­book bud­get to Insta­gram after dis­cov­er­ing Insta­gram Sto­ries CPMs had become half the cost of its in-feed Face­book ads.

SOURCE