Instagram is today bringing e-commerce to Reels as the holiday shopping season kicks into high gear.
The feature begins rolling out today and will allow users, businesses and influencers to tag their posts with links to buy products featured, for users to click-through and buy, or save for later. Influencers can even add their own-branded tags to paid posts.
When users view those Reels, they can tap “View Products” to buy the product, save the Reel or learn more about the product.
“We don’t take these changes lightly — we haven’t updated Instagram’s home screen in a big way for quite a while,” Instagram said about its redesign in a statement last month. “But how people create and enjoy culture has changed, and the biggest risk to Instagram is not that we change too fast, but that we don’t change and become irrelevant.”
Instagram first announced the addition of shopping on IGTV back in October, with a promise that testing in Reels would be followed by a launch in the coming months.
The arrival of shopping within Reels is part of an aggressive program of upgraded functionality over the past few months, which includes the long-awaited interoperability with Facebook Messenger, as well as a revamp of the user interface.
The company has made shopping features prominent placement in Instagram, and just introduced a shopping cart feature for WhatsApp. Facebook is also encouraging business owners to turn their pages into online storefronts.
