Sorry, you still can’t shop directly from Instagram! A frustration for brands, because what you do with Instagram except for some branding?
There is a lot more about Instagram, I am even writing an book about it right now, but even for shopping there are some clever tools and detours to make your feed shoppable. In this blogpost, I will tell you about four different ways. Nice to read for shoppers as well as brands! And the best way to shop Instagram is ….

ROI of Instagram
Since the massive growth of social media channel Instagram everyone is looking for ways to actually do some sales on Instagram. Because yes, social media is fun, but the boss still wants to see an interesting ROI ( Return on Investment) and preferably in hard cash.

Only ONE URL
I am observing all ways people are trying out to make Instagram photo’s shoppable, and that’s not easy when you realize you can not post links to your photos, there is only one possibility and that’s the url in your profile. So think hard about what you put in that place, some bloggers fit each new blog post in there.

Liketoknow.it

The first shop application that I saw was LiketoKnow.IT  It’s set up by the smart lady who also set up affiliate network Reward Style, Amber Venz. How it works: you sign up online at Liketoknow.it with your email address  When you then click ‘like ‘ button under photos on Instagram tagged with #liketoknowit you will get an email with the products that were on that photo and links to where you can buy them. Many fashion bloggers work with this tool and Vogue USA did a test, but seems to have stopped. It is still a roundabout, but pretty okay.

Dash Hudson

Dash Hudson features photos from Instagram users in its own app, which you have to download. The editors of Dash Hudson (a super nice name by the way!) search a database of 50,000 products from 1400 brands to look for similar products and connect these picks to the photo. So different app, different but seemingly alike clothes and I wonder….how is the copyright of these photos regulated?

The best solution to make your Instagram pics shoppable: Like2Buy

I discovered the new tool Like2buy a few months ago. Major retailers and department stores Nordstrom and Target use it to make their Instagrampics shoppable. It works very simple too: You click on the link in the Instagram profile of Nordstrom and you are sent to a mobile optimized shop page in your browser where the pictures of their Instagram feed are clickable, thus shoppable. You can also pick your favorites in the app. It’s no traffic to your own site, but when “selling” is your goal, then this is the best and quickest way to achieve that goal.
This is so far my absolute favorite among the several attempts!

Learn more about Instagram?
Follow kirst_enj for my daily tip on Instagram or check my blog justK for regular updates on this subject.
Also read my blogpost about buying Instagram followers and InstagramTIPS