Instagram launching shopping tags for UK businesses

Instagram announced that it would launch a new ‘Shopping Tags feature’ which UK businesses got very excited by. The shopping tags feature on Instagram is exactly like Facebook’s photo tagging but instead of tagging a person, you can actually tag an individual item and add a price which would then take the user who clicked it to a website to purchase the item, this feature is available for any specific items on an Instagram image. This news about the new feature has many Instagram users including online retailers, beauty and fashion bloggers and other types of businesses really excited.

Instagram has been testing this feature for the last 6 months, launching it for US businesses in October of 2017 which allowed a maximum of up to five clickable links in an image.

Shopify which is a very popular e-commerce partner for many UK business is always ahead of the curve in regards to integrating new features such as social media tools have announced their support for the new shopping Instagram shopping tags feature and have said that Instagram is one of there biggest drivers of online sales to there platform.

The Instagram shopping tags feature is currently only available to approved businesses in certain countries which includes the United States of America, United Kingdom, Australia, Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Spain and Brazil for now and should look to expand to other countries in the future.

Any business that wants to use Instagrams new shopping tags feature must actually sell physical goods and not digital downloads or any other kind of none physical goods and all items must comply with Instagrams merchant goods policies.

To use the new Instagram shopping tags feature your Instagram account needs to have been converted into a business profile which you can do via your Instagram settings and select ‘Switch to Business Profile’ and then you will need to select the Facebook Page you’d like your Instagram account to be associated with, you need to make sure that your Instagram account is set to public to use ‘Instagram shopping tags’ as private accounts cannot be switched to business accounts.
Your Facebook business profile must be connected to a Facebook catalogue and this can be done by selecting the Business Manager option, through Shopify platform or directly on Facebook itself.

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