Instagram Wants to Ease Its Users into Shopping

For a week in May, some of Instagram's designers, engineers and product managers met not at the company's Menlo Park, California, headquarters but at a rented house, stocked with grocery store snacks. There, away from computers and armed with pencil and paper, they explored a question important for the photo-sharing app's future: how do we get our users to shop?

In particular, they wanted to figure out how to introduce shopping tools without making them so obvious that they would transform the app into a splashy catalog. Together they came up with 150 ideas. After an extensive process of elimination, the team settled on the design being unveiled this week: letting brands tag products in their photos, the way users tag their friends. Tap on the tagging descriptions to get more information, tap again to buy on the retailer's site.

It's the first test from Facebook Inc.'s Instagram to kick off a broader strategy for helping people pick out and buy things, according to James Quarles, Instagram's vice president of monetization. The team will gather data from users' behavior to figure out what to do next. Maybe they'll add a way to comparison shop, a way to search for products elsewhere on the app or even a Pinterest-like feature to save posts that inspire, he said.

"We are so well-positioned in this space," Quarles said. "Instagram is super visual, we have a well-defined graph of your interests based on what you're following, and the serendipity of discovery happens every day through the ad products and who you follow."

People have long been shopping on Instagram without a formal way to buy things. A crop of influencers on the photo app push fashions into popularity. Company researchers have noticed that users take screenshots of products they love, or direct-message them to themselves. But, like the design team's caution suggests, making shopping an actual app feature is a risky proposition.