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Instagram's New Shoppable Photos Are a Glimpse At Its E-Commerce Future (theverge.com)

Posted by BeauHD on from the add-item-to-cart dept.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Verge: Instagram influencers have long tried to hack the app to make money by putting "purchase link in bio" when they photograph something you can buy. The company has noticed, so now it's making it easier for users to make purchases from within the app -- but only for certain brands. Starting next week, select iOS users will see shoppable photos with a white icon displayed on the lower left corner. Tapping it reveals the items in the photo that are available for purchase, and clicking it takes you to the product's description page. To buy, you'll have to click another link that leads you to the retailer's website. Instagram currently allows brands to promote products using an ad format, but the new shopping feature can be applied to regular posts as well. It's partnering up with 20 retail brands like J.Crew, Kate Spade, and Warby Parker at launch, and plans to expand globally. No word on whether that means non-retailers like celebrities and influencers will be able to take advantage of the feature, which opens up big monetization potentials for Instagram.

5 of 11 comments (clear)

  1. not worth it... by FatdogHaiku · · Score: 1

    not even worth a post... oops..

    --
    You have the right to remain sentient. If you give up the right to remain sentient, you will be elected to public office
    1. Re:not worth it... by mark-t · · Score: 1

      if X is Y-able then you can Y X. This means that Y must be usable as a transitive verb

      As a transitive verb, "to shop" means to either give information on the target of the verb to someone else, particularly to the police, or else as a verbed noun, could colloquially refer to the process of using photoshop on the verb's target, although that would more correctly necessitate use of an apostrophe at the beginning: 'shoppable.

      While either could be argued to make sense when applied to people (someone who committed a crime that you know about and could report to the police, or else implying that a person either regularly has or so badly needs to have pictures of them photoshopped that you refer to the person as 'shoppable). but neither definition seems to fit how the word is being used here.

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      File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
    2. Re:not worth it... by mark-t · · Score: 1

      Sure... a small child might, because only if they don't know English structure well enough to realize that you can't put the -able suffix on an intransitive verb and have it mean anything. The point of the '-able' suffix is that to create an adjective out a verb where what you are describing with the word is something that you can directly do that verb to. By the noun being the direct target of the verb, that means that the verb must be transitive. When you buy something or go to shop for something, you don't "shop" that thing... you shop *FOR* that thing. Outside of the British informal slang for giving information to the police about somebody or if preceded by an apostrophe, the verbification of the product Photoshop, "shop" has no legitimate definition as a transitive verb, and so "shoppable" cannot mean anything relative to the intransitive form of the verb shop.

      The correct term is "purchaseable" or "buyable".

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      File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
  2. "influencers have long tried to hack the app" by turkeydance · · Score: 1

    isn't that the goal for all of them? Snapchat, Twitter, etc.

  3. "Shoppable photos" should mean... by mark-t · · Score: 1

    ... photos that have been or are able to be "shopped", which would suggest that they are photoshopped.

    What the fuck is happening to English?

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    File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'