The rate at which fashion brands are adopting Instagram to showcase products and engage with fans is paving the way for the image-sharing network to become a fashion e-commerce platform. The CEO of Instagram Kevin Systrom says that although the site was not designed with e-commerce in mind, brands are already using their profiles to preview goods.
With pressure mounting on Facebook to make money from the firm it shelled out USD1bn for a year and a half ago, closing the loop between marketing and click-to-buy features is an increasingly attractive option for the firm.
“We never set out thinking of Instagram as a platform for commerce, but in some ways it is already becoming that for folks in fashion,” says Systrom in an interview at London Fashion Week. “It’s not just about imagery, it’s about the conversations as well. As long as you can curate what you want to follow and don’t want to follow, that’s really the balance.”
Fashion E-commerce Opportunity
E-commerce is a big opportunity for Instagram. Like Pinterest, Instagram has become a huge platform for sharing images of goods, from food to clothes to art, but neither service has yet closed the e-commerce loop to making actual purchases. Increased consumer spending is sending the e-commerce market through the roof and within that fashion is, unsurprisingly, one of the biggest sectors, with consumers shelling out more than 1trillion online last year, this could be Instragram’s ticket into the black.
It’s an attractive proposition for marketers. Instragram offers brands a hugely engaged global potential customer base. The firm recently hit 150m monthly users. That puts it not far behind Twitter, with 200m. With a third of these joining in the past six months alone, it looks like Instragram’s remarkable growth is showing now signs of letting up, for now at least. What’s more the firm now has more users outside the US than inside, with 60% of its users now coming from international.
Story by Sarah Gill
