Town Square: Learn How to Sell Products on Instagram

[Helen]

Have you seen the latest Town Square post about How to use Instagram Shoppable posts? This step-by-step guide will help you sell your items on one of the world’s most popular social media platforms.

⏲ Town Square: How to Use Instagram Shoppable Posts to Sell on Social Media - A 60-second Summary 

• With Instagram shoppable posts, you can sell products directly from shoppers’ feeds. Users can browse, buy, and check out without leaving the app. 
• Learn how to use Instagram to create shoppable posts takes only a few steps, but there are some requirements that must be met first.
• Once you’ve set up your Instagram account (see requirements above) you’ll see the option to “Tag Products” when you start a new post or when you edit an existing one. You select the product from the catalog, and place the tag near the product in the image. Then share your post.
• Learn more about selling on Instagram (and Facebook) in this Seller Community Product Update.

Have you started using shoppable posts? Do you use the feature year-round, or to promote seasonal offers? Has Instagram become an important sales channel for your business? Let us know in the comments below - you are welcome to share links to your business Instagram account too or add pics! 

[BethanyReynolds]

Thanks for the setup info! I was able to tag several older posts, but ran into a couple of problems. One post had 5 pix, and it looked like I could only  tag the first pic from my Instagram feed in the site editor. The arrows just took me to the next post, and I couldnʻt see how to get to the other four pix in that post to tag them.

On another post, I had an item that is on my website, but I couldnʻt get it to appear when I searched for items to tag, even when I entered the exact name. Is there a reason some items might not be taggable?

[Helen]

@BethanyReynolds I'm very sorry for this late reply. Are you still having trouble tagging the remaining pictures? This post has some troubleshooting steps for items not showing on Instagram but I'm not sure that's exactly what's happening here. I've escalated this for you and we'll follow up here as soon as possible.

[DinaLRosenberg]

For whatever reason Instagram disconnected (or Square did) our entire connection and we never have been able to get it back. Instagram isn't really serving static photos now anyway- can you tag reels? If not- not super useful anyway.

[sbuchanan]

Hello, our team took a look at your account. It seems that our authorization to access your Instagram account failed at some point. That would have happened on Meta's side, and we don't have visibility into why. I apologize if you had issues reconnecting in the past. We have an updated integration with Meta (Facebook & Instagram) available now, and if you go through the setup steps, it should reconnect. Let us know if you run into further issues.

[Helen]

@DinaLRosenberg Hmm that's odd. It looks like you should be able to tag products in reels. I've asked a member of our team to take a look at this thread and we'll follow up here as soon as we can.

[DinaLRosenberg]

For whatever reason we used to have all our products synced to Meta and now it's gone and we have no idea how to get it back. Is there a specialist at Square the would be able to help without us calling the 800# and going thru the maze?

[BethanyReynolds]

I don’t think I have seen a product tag in a reel, though admittedly I don’t spend a lot of time on IG. But I just scrolled through a bunch of commercial reel posts, and did not see any with a product icon. Tapping the screen generally just turns the audio on/off. Some reels had text telling people to click on the link below (i.e. in the caption). While creating reels, I have never seen an option to tag products. Maybe IG just doesn’t support tagging.

[BethanyReynolds]

Thanks for the suggestion, Helen. I think I am confused in general about the integration between Meta and Square/Weebly. I have Facebook and Instagram accounts, and have gone through the process to link them. (i thought), but I have never entered items into a Facebook Shop. Is that required in order for the product tags to show on Instagram in the app (vs just on the feed on my website)? I don’t really use the Meta Business much, and not enough time right now to wade into that. I had thought (and hoped) that product tags just worked like links, but maybe there’s another layer of integration required that I’ve missed?

[Stacelyn24]

Thank you for this Helen.  We're selling through Instagram this year for the holiday season.  Extremely excited because this is our first year and I want to see how it's going to go 🙂

[Helen]

Sounds great, I'd love to hear how it all goes if you have time to let us know!