Meta announced on Tuesday that it will shut down its live shopping feature on Instagram. The company, which made the announcement on its support page, noted that this move “will help us focus on products and features that provide the most value to our users.”
So, beginning March 16th, creators will no longer be able to tag products during IG Live sessions. Online shopping isn’t going away completely on Instagram. Instead, the company wants to quit the livestream shopping business on Instagram, just like it did for Facebook in October last year. Live shopping lets sellers show off their products and gives customers the chance to buy them right away.
Meta, however, noted that they could still be able to set up and run your shop on Instagram as we continue to invest in shopping experiences for people and businesses across feed, stories, Reels, ads and more.
Instagram assures merchants that “you will still be able to set up and run your shop on Instagram” as the company “continues to invest in shopping experiences for people and businesses across feed, stories, Reels, ads, and more.” And the rest of the livestreaming features work as usual.
Live commerce will no longer be a priority as Instagram shifts its emphasis to advertising as a means by which users can find and shop from local businesses. Ad performance can be enhanced with the help of its automated tools, it says, and these include Shop ads and Advantage+ shopping campaigns. The company will also keep pouring resources into its checkout system, which will allow users to buy something directly from Instagram and Facebook Stories, Feed, or Reels with just a few taps.
Meta’s decision doesn’t come as a surprise though. The company is just looking for ways to cut costs because of the tough economy as well as a pricey metaverse pivot are hurting its bottom line. It therefore wants to cut projects that don’t do well the most.
Instagram has recently shown that it plans to downplay e-commerce within its platform. It made a pretty big change to its navigation last month, taking away the Shop tab and moving the Reels tab to the side. The changes were made in response to growing complaints from users about how hard Instagram was pushing Reels, which was caused by Instagram’s competition with TikTok. In a recent post he did on Stories, the platform’s CEO Adam Mosseri admitted the company had overemphasised video and would attempt to rebalance the ratio of photos to videos. It’s also possible that this decrease contributed to the demise of live shopping.
Instagram is not the only social platform struggling with shopping features. As of late last year, TikTok was planning to introduce live shopping to North America, but it was only going to use technology that was outsourced.
The Financial Times reported last summer that anonymous sources said TikTok was reducing its ambitions due to low interest in the UK and a subsequent exodus of employees.
Social shopping couldn’t have appealed to that “large audience” as anticipated by the tech giants who saw the pandemic as an opportunity to start adding built-in online features.
