Since 2017, we’ve been advocating for native checkout experiences to become the norm. We're pleased to be one of the official partners Instagram is using to bring native checkout to Merchants. 

With more than one billion users, Instagram represents one of the biggest potential channels for brands. Brands and Merchants are already part of the way people use and experience Instagram—one third of the most-viewed stories are from businesses, and 60 percent of users say they discover new products on Instagram. But for years, Merchants have struggled to remove the friction between their products and the people they wanted to reach.

That’s where checkout on Instagram comes in. This native shopping experience turns Instagram into a social marketplace where users can purchase products without ever leaving the app. It creates a convenient, non-disruptive experience for Instagram users while helping brands maximize conversions.

Violet connects an online storefront with checkout on Instagram, allowing Merchants to take advantage of this feature. This will be one of many applications and channels to leverage purchases at the edge and in-stream.

How does it work?

Checkout on Instagram lets businesses sell products directly within the Instagram app, without customers having to click out to a website to make the purchase. There is an option for consumers to save their billing and shipping information with Instagram, so shoppers don’t have to tediously type it out (and hunt for their credit card) every time they discover a new brand. Upon completing the purchase, they can be back to their feed in seconds.

It’s the smoothest checkout experience for Instagram users—and that means more conversions for Merchants. 

With checkout on Instagram, every image, video, and story a brand shares has the potential to become an interactive storefront. Merchants can keep posting the same engaging content, and now anyone can effortlessly purchase the tagged products. And with Violet, the transaction is handled seamlessly between the Channel (Instagram) and the ecommerce platform of origin. The order gets processed exactly like it came through the website directly.

Perfecting the process

If you’ve ever tried to sell on Instagram before, you know that Facebook’s Catalog Manager is the connection point to coordinate product data from a source of some type. Ideally, you want to get your catalog on their platform. The key here is to make sure there is no difference between the products and orders on your website and the products and orders inside of Instagram. This is a consistent challenge for apps working in and around the innovation of ecommerce.

Other solutions have forced Merchants to either manage separate inventory systems, or manually populate orders to their ecommerce platform. These often involve complex (and error-prone) processes, especially as many third parties tried to use a simple feed to handle a much more complicated and holistic integration.

In other words, when customers purchased outside of the website, they could have a completely different or disconnected experience with the Merchant—because they weren’t directly interacting with the Merchant or the real-time data associated with the product itself.

We’re changing that. Our software creates a seamless connection between ecommerce platforms and Channels. In this case, Instagram becomes a natural extension of someone's online store.

After Riomar Shoes processed their first sale with Violet, President Mac Smith said, “It was like a transaction had occurred natively on our website.”

It's your turn to add checkout

Save yourself the headache and use Violet to connect directly to Merchants. Start to finish, you can integrate universal checkout into your app as quickly as a couple days.

See our recipes in our documentation to see for yourself!