Has the industry’s favorite social media outlet become its newest sales channel?
The design industry is hot for Instagram, not simply because of its blissful ease of use as a place where emojis pass for dialogue, or its endless inspiration. What retailers and design brands recognize is the sophisticated way it merges social media and commerce, validating the oldest and wisest of idioms: A picture is worth a thousand words. And now, you can shop it.
Instagram has slipped seamlessly into the daily routines of more than 700 million monthly active users. Forward-thinking design brands have been harnessing the app’s marketing superpowers as a potent new sales channel, transforming their feeds into m-commerce (mobile commerce) experiences that offer immediate access to the goods. In an obsessively smartphone-connected society, consumers are transacting with taps over clicks. Criteo’s “The State of Cross-Device Commerce H2 2016” study reported, “In the U.S., nearly two in five online purchases are completed on mobile, a year-over-year increase of 20 percent” and “Smartphones now account for a quarter of all online retail sales in the U.S., showing a year-over-year increase of 41 percent.”
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