How to Sell on Instagram Shop with Instagram Shopping?

The answer to how to sell on Instagram shop is to simply leverage the wealth of marketing opportunities for e-commerce.

There’s plenty of chances to reach your intended audience, especially with big numbers as much as 1 billion active users per month and 400 million using Instagram stories every day.

Learning how to sell products on Instagram is a bit of a challenge though, and it might require some creativity from your side, especially due to the fact that there are several ways to do so.

In the following parts, we are going to have a look at why and how some of the world’s top brands are using Instagram to up-sell and increase conversions.

How to Sell on Instagram 2021 📱

Selling on Instagram is quickly turning to be preferred by many merchants not just in terms of easy Instagram ads but also to sell and make a profit in a few simple steps.

Simple expert tips before getting into the deep talk:

• Leverage user generated content
• Always tag products on Instagram posts
• Sell through Instagram stories with a link to your product page
• Use social media tools to design your Instagram feed
• It’s perfect to use landing pages that direct to your Instagram shop
• Social networking is a great way of growing your community
• Remember to insert your username on your Facebook page “about” section
• Use an efficient call to action in all posts to increase your Instagram sales

Fact

At least 80% of Instagram users follow a business page, which is making it easier for brands to make the buyer’s journey much simpler and hence quicker to drive sales.

Example

A fellow merchant was just starting a small business this past year, and after researching the eCommerce market for a while and speaking with eCommerce gurus at ExpandCart, his interest quickly developed in the direction of learning how to sell clothes on Instagram.

After a few months of running a stunning online clothing store and syncing it with our Instagram integration, his sales were skyrocketed in just a few months of starting out his business.

Almost every small business page now is witnessing solid ROI out of selling on Instagram.

Read more Learn How to Master Instagram Hashtags in 2021

Getting started: How to Sell Products on Instagram

Before selling your products on Instagram, make sure you have completed the following:

• Your business sells products that are in compliance with Instagram’s commerce guidelines.
• Your Instagram account is a business profile
• Your Instagram business profile is connected to a Facebook catalog.

After you have completed all of the above, you could start Instagram ads to increase brand awareness and make a profit.

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The Way Brands Are Selling on Instagram

Instagram is highly visual, that’s why it’s quite convenient for e-commerce merchants of all sizes and industries to setup their store there.

But here is where it gets a bit tricky; creating attractive graphics in Instagram feed, as it gets difficult to be recognized among hundreds of brands competing for the buyer’s attention.

Here are three useful tips to make the best use of your Instagram posts:

1. Use high-quality photos

High-quality photos play a big part in your brand awareness journey.

Brands need to make sure that they post nothing but photos of high quality for their products, which happens to be easy with the capabilities of smartphones that are able to take the product photos with the needed quality, especially if they are on a budget that is not too high.

Read more: Instagram Stories Design Tips for Ecommerce Businesses

Let’s take this example of Beardbrand that uses flat-lay photos to exhibit the favorites while adding a product tag for each item.

Here are the elements that make the images of Beardbrand’s products of high quality:

• Background: Use a white, gray, or black backdrop behind the products to give photos a neat and clear look that is consistent across several products.
• Table: Using a table to make products appear higher and easier to be photographed
• Light: Using natural window light or using a lamp or even renting a softbox lighting kit to provide the proper lighting.

When photographing more than one product, make sure you tag products separately so that shoppers interested in certain ones can know more about them.

Though it might seem like some deal of work to get the right quality of photos, it’s worth the effort especially considering the fact that you can reuse and repurpose such photos later on.

But the following point will let you know that staging your products is not the only way to excel at selling on Instagram.

2. Your products as part of a lifestyle

The magic ingredient here is to show your product in action, that way you can help your potential customer imagine himself using your products and push him further along the selling funnel nearer to sealing the deal.

Herschel Supply Co is one very good example of helping the customer see others and themselves using their products in unique lifestyle photos.

What makes this approach quite effective is that instead of providing a call to action to ‘buy’, they share real stories from their potential customer who admire the brand, which is a motivator for other people to take action.

3. Leverage user-generated content

If people are buying and using your product, there is a chance they are talking about it on social media, that’s why user-generated content is a cool way to leverage good quality content while still using features of shopping on Instagram.

One of the great examples of using user-generated content is inkbox Tattoos, where they have leverage photos from their users reaching one million fans on Instagram alone.

inkbox Tattoos have grown by more than 500,000 in 2018, something that says a lot about the effectiveness of their approach, add to this making use of Shopping on Instagram, and we have got a winner here, a one that is not slowing down on acquiring new fans.

Instagram first began testing a shopping feature in November 2016, rolling it out globally in March of last year. Now with the addition of the Shopping Tab to Explore, Instagram’s algorithm selects items it believes users will be interested in buying.

Here’s what it looks like:

Since its inception by the end of 2016, and especially with the addition of the Shopping Tab to Explore, Instagram has been employing algorithms to select items that are believed to garner interest and show it to users.

Here is a glimpse of how it looks like:

Facebook said earlier that 90 million people per month tab posts to see shopping tags. The shopping tab is another cornerstone for embracing e-commerce even further.

And that’s why social media has been embraced by many brands as they could easily connect with their audience even deeper, and leverage user-generated content to their benefit to gather more real stories that gain them traction, something that was not very easy to do with brand-generated content.

Read more Digital marketing channels that affect Ecommerce

How Top Brands Increase Instagram Sales

With more than 80% of Instagram users following an account of business, the roll-out of Shopping on Instagram has offered a golden opportunity for merchants to up their game in e-commerce by tagging products in posts, something that shortens the span of the buyer’s journey.

But before beginning to gain and increase your Instagram sales, it’s better to learn those 3 following points first:

1. Quality is important

As people make quick judgments about your brand, it’s important to take care of factors such as the photos of your product and the relevant description which are a crucial part of the buyer’s journey and could either affect your brand positioning positively or negatively depending on the quality.

You’d also love to read 10 Practical E-commerce Growth Strategies for a High Growth Business

2. Help shoppers envision your product

One of the most appealing methods is to guide your potential customers on how their lives can be better with your product, so always look towards how you can say so using photos, so you’d better focus your ad efforts on how people could use your product, not on the features of the product.

Advice

You can do this using the product page by simply reading How To Write Creative, Attractive, Professional Product Description.

3. Use video

Video marketing is one of the successful and promising tactics that you could employ on Instagram, as people are more inclined to buy upon watching a video more than seeing a photo.

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Final Words

Shopping on Instagram is only just the beginning for merchants looking to boost product sales. As more and more consumers get used to this exciting new shopping frontier, it’s up to your brand to deliver your products where customers are spending the majority of their time: social media.

Now it’s up to your brand to make use of the traffic of social media as more and more people tend to spend the majority of their time there, and with Shopping on Instagram as just a beginning to exciting opportunities in e-commerce, it’s about time to benefit where most of your customers reside.