Every year online commerce increases and there are more people who ” go shopping ” on Instagram . In fact, according to Hootsuite , one in two people have used Instagram to discover new brands.
This is a very good opportunity that we can take advantage of by creating our own Instagram store in a few steps and start making extra money. For this reason, in this post, we will tell you step by step how to set up a store on Instagram without the need for any prior technical knowledge and for a negligible amount of money.
It is time to start that project that you have been thinking about for a while and start selling online.
Create an Instagram Shop: Requirements
Before you start selling on Instagram, you should know that there are a series of requirements that you must meet to use this functionality. They are the following:
- Your Instagram profile must be a company or creator : Personal accounts cannot have a store on Instagram, so you must change this setting.
It is a very simple step, which you can do in “ Settings”, “Account” and scroll down until you reach the option “ Switch to professional account”. - Have published at least 9 posts : A good option is to upload photos related to your products or your brand.
- Your store should sell physical products, not services : If you are dedicated to selling services, Instagram does not provide you with this option (at the moment).
- Have a website for your store : It is necessary that your store on Instagram have a “backup” on the web.
- Link your Facebook Fan Page to Instagram and have a Facebook Business Manager account : To be able to upload the products to Instagram, it is necessary to have this link.
- Download the latest version of Instagram : This requirement is very simple, and to check if you have the latest version installed you can go to the platform from where you download the applications (Google Play, App Store etc.), search for “ Instagram ” and check the current version. If you don’t have it, an option will appear for you to update it.
- Your business must comply with Instagram’s Commerce Policies and Trade Agreements and be within the following permitted markets and countries.
Create an Instagram Shop: How to Create
Instagram Shop is a feature of Instagram that allows brands to create a store on this social network and allows users to directly buy the tagged products of the account they follow.
What this allows us is to be able to label the products of your store in the posts (those in the feed or the stories) and that users can buy it directly, since when you click on the product label you access the sale through a direct gateway of this on your website.
In fact, we can find the ” Shop ” section in the main menu of Instagram. This is a revolution, since Instagram is positioned very strongly in online sales.
The user experience is much more complete than if you search from Google and we can even reach a lot more people, since our product can appear in recommended content without even looking for it directly.
Create an Instagram Shop: Step By Step
In this section, we see in detail each step to create a shop on Instagram.
- Company profile on your Instagram account : If your Instagram account is still personal (default mode when we create an account) we will not be able to create our store. In order to create our store on Instagram we need to have the profile configured as a company.
- Connect Facebook shop with Instagram : With the company account already configured, we can connect our account to the Facebook page. For that, follow these steps:
– Access the profile
– Click on “ Edit ” and in the “ Company Public Information ” section, click on “ Page ”.
– Now, select the Facebook page you want to connect, and if you don’t have it, yet, we can create it. - Create the product catalog :The third step to create our Instagram store is to create and connect the product catalog of our store.
In this step, what we have to do is upload the products that we are going to sell in our store to Facebook.
We do this step through Business Manager or through the platform with which we have our online store (Shopify, WooCommerce etc.) - Send Shop for review on Facebook : Once you have the catalog created, you must submit your Instagram shop for review by Meta. This can take anywhere from 3 days to 2 weeks.
For that, go to the “Settings” section, from the button on the top right in the shape of three horizontal sticks and click on “Company”.
Now click on “Sign up for Shopping on Instagram”.
If during the process you want to see the status of the request for this review, you can see it in the “ Settings ” and “ Purchases ” section. - Activate product tagging: The fifth step is to activate the product tagging of our Instagram store . For that, our store has to have been reviewed by Meta, so if this is not the case yet, you will have to wait.
- Tag your store products in posts : To start selling your products on Instagram, it is best to upload a post and tag them. This way your followers will see your product in their feed.
For this, you must follow the normal process of uploading a post to Instagram and once you have added the photo and text, you must click on “Tag products”.
Like when we tag a person in a post, click where the product is in the photo and you will see the list of available products.
Write the name of the products you want to label and select them. When you have it, click “Done” and “Share”.
