Instagram Shopping announces new requirements, expands to more businesses

With a lot of businesses dipping their toes into selling their products online, we’ll be seeing a lot of the tech brands offering tools and services to help entrepreneurs out. While Instagram is not primarily an e-commerce platform, it has become a great marketing tool for creatives, products, and other more visual businesses. They launched Instagram Shopping for select businesses and territories and now they’re expanding it to more places and accounts. Along with this comes new eligibility requirements of course.

Instagram has posted its new “Commerce Eligibility Requirements” for businesses that are on the platform and would like to avail of the Instagram Shopping platform. Obviously, they will have to adhere to these guidelines and policies in order to be allowed to do Instagram selling directly from the app without having to go to an external website. But the first qualification for it is to actually have a website which the Instagram account represents.

This actually means that your product listing must be available so potential customers can choose to directly buy from the website or using Facebook or Instagram Checkout. The account must also have an “authentic” and established presence with a good follower base in order to prove your “trustworthiness” to Instagram. The other rules are boilerplate things like displaying correct and not misleading prices, having a proper refund and return policy, etc.

The updated eligibility requirements will take into effect by July 9 and so business that are in markets where Instagram Shopping is available will be able to apply. Those that are already on the platform will receive a notification and instructions on how to comply with these new policies. If you’re just new and you apply and you’re not approved, you’ll get an explanation as to why so you can fix things and get approved upon re-applying.

While you probably don’t go to Instagram just to go shopping, this is an opportunity for creators and entrepreneurs that are already there to get a new revenue stream. And of course, this is added monetization for the platform itself. Let’s see after July 9 if this gamble will be worth it both for sellers and for the audience itself.