Less than two weeks after launching a test of a new ecommerce feature with some users, Instagram is rolling out the Shop tab to all U.S.-based accounts.
The new tab, which was announced in May, appears as part of Instagram’s Explore section on mobile. (That’s just for now; in a blog post about Shop, Instagram said it will have its own dedicated spot in the navigation bar later this year.) Users who head in will find a Discover-like page of “fresh collections and products from brands and creators, as well as special curations from our social shopping channel, @shop,” Instagram said.
Within Shop, users can browse products by broad categories like beauty, clothing/accessories, home, and travel. As you can see below, the section also offers a scrollable selection of brands, plus a personalized “Suggested for You” section. Instagram indicated that in the future, Shop will give users access to exclusive product launches.
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Unsurprisingly, Instagram’s other major ecommerce feature, Checkout, has a significant presence in Shop. Checkout has been around for more than a year, and lets brands–in exchange for a reported 5% selling fee–make their products available for browsing, purchasing, and shipment tracking in Instagram’s apps. In the Shop tab, products that are part of Checkout are prominently indicated with an arrow symbol.
Shop does have products that aren’t part of Checkout, but users will be taken out of app to complete those purchases. It’s not clear whether Instagram makes some kind of selling fee there, too.
Instagram said that in the coming weeks, it will do two things: One, open up Shop to users around the globe; and two, enable Facebook Pay for U.S.-based users. Its parent company’s nascent pay system operates kind of like PayPal’s One Touch feature, keeping users logged in, making payments, and sharing data about those payments with Facebook across the internet.
