Instagram to End Live Shopping, Focus Instead on Ads
As Meta gears up for its “year of efficiency,” the company announced earlier this week that it’s exiting the livestream shopping business on Instagram, following a similar shutdown on Facebook. Starting on March 16, Instagram users will no longer be able to tag products while livestreaming — a capability that has been broadly available to U.S. businesses and creators since 2020. The changes highlight the difficulties the U.S. market has had in making livestream shopping successful. One report noted that social commerce as a whole, which includes livestream shopping, only made up around 5 percent of total e-commerce sales in the U.S. last year, per Insider Intelligence data.
Total Retail's Take: Signaling the arrival of livestream shopping here in the U.S. may have been a bit premature. While generating headlines, in large part because of the immense popularity of the shopping channel in Asia, to date livestream has failed to live up to the hype. The behavior hasn't been adopted by American consumers like many industry analysts and social platforms thought it may. Why is that and what does this news mean for the future of marketing and social media? Alyssa Trenkamp, vice president, brand marketing and communications at Uberall, a hybrid customer experience platform, offered her thoughts to Total Retail.
"Social media channels like Instagram are highly influential in the brand discovery process, especially among younger consumers (Gen Z) in particular. According to a recent study by Uberall on customer experience, 53 percent of consumers say they saw something on social media that influenced their decision to buy from a nearby business. Gen Z was the most influenced, with 70 percent saying content on social media influenced a purchase decision from a nearby business.
"Instagram’s decision to end the live shopping feature may lead these consumers to look to other platforms like Nextdoor, TikTok and even the metaverse for a more personalized discovery path. Moreover, Gen Z will look for options where they can ask for recommendations from friends, search up and discover new places and share their discoveries with their friends in a way that feels more authentic and less formulaic."
