[Using Social Media] Could Instagram Help Your Product Sales (E-Commerce Site) Stand Out?

From ACIDHOUSE, INC., this is Tetsuya Ashida.

I sometimes get questions like this from small business owners who have websites.

We have stores on shopping malls like Rakuten and Yahoo! Shopping, but we're being worn down by price competition. At the same time, we can't get around to revamping our own e-commerce site or running ads. Is there any way to improve things even a little with the media and resources we have now?

This article should help anyone with that question.

Graduate early from Rakuten and Yahoo! Shopping

As a premise, shopping malls (Rakuten, Yahoo! Shopping, Amazon, Recruit-affiliated ones) have far too many sellers, so don't put too much effort into them.

Even if you try to win there, the best you can hope for is to be pitched expensive ads that promise VIP treatment.

To put it bluntly, you'll just end up being made a sucker.

Hold on to "your customer list and those relationships," a key asset for any small business, while skillfully moving to a different fishing pond.

Using Instagram for e-commerce is worth trying

For "e-commerce = selling things," photos and videos are extremely important.

Many people think of Instagram when it comes to photos and videos, but many probably also think it's hard to use Instagram for e-commerce because you can't put links in captions.

However, with the following two methods, it's more than possible to use Instagram for e-commerce.

Run Instagram Stories ads

When you're viewing Stories, there's a "See more" at the bottom of the screen.

Swiping up on it can display a URL.

Whether with video or still images, you can catch customers' interest in 15 seconds and guide them to a landing page or YouTube.

However, this feature can't be used unless you have more than 10,000 followers.

Growing to 10,000+ followers takes steady effort, but you can get around it by running Instagram Stories ads.

It's like listing ads and SEO: growing followers while using ads seems to be the way to go.

The shopping feature that can be attached directly to posts

Simply put, the shopping feature lets you attach a purchase function to Instagram images and pull customers along the purchase path within Instagram.

For now, it seems purchases can't be completed entirely within Instagram, but that will probably be implemented in the future.

Give your audience an easy way to buy

See, tap, buy
Tag products in your photos, videos, and Stories so that every post becomes a buying opportunity. With a tap, people see detailed descriptions, additional images, and related items in your store — all without ever leaving Instagram.

Buy now, or save to buy later
When the timing is right, people can tap through to the seller's mobile site and complete the purchase. Or they can use the save feature to bookmark the product and add it to a personal collection so they can come back and buy it later.

Connect with future customers
Shopping posts can be shared by people in Explore, which is accessed by 200 million accounts2 a day. By selling on Instagram, people who don't currently follow you can also discover your business and products.

Create a mobile storefront on Instagram (Instagram official site)

*If you watch the video on the site quoted above, you'll get an idea of what it's like.

The shopping feature isn't available just because you have an Instagram account.

That said, you only need to meet the following requirements:

It's all just settings in a browser, so there's no reason not to do it.

Please refer to the following site and try setting it up.