What Doug Weiss learned when building shopping at Instagram

"In the 4 years since the initial launch of onsite checkout, there have been more than 100 different capabilities that have been launched, each one requiring a technical update. Meta had more than 500 engineers working on different aspects of commerce, and brands had to figure out how to keep up with what was usually a fraction of one person."

Doug Weiss led Meta’s commerce efforts as Head of Commerce Platform Partnerships and later Head of Creator Commerce.  In those roles, Doug had a front row seat to the significant upside and the unexpected challenges of enabling commerce in the latest marketplace evolution.

We asked Doug to share some of his learnings from that experience in hopes that it could help current platforms and marketplaces break through their own lingering commerce challenges.


In this post, Doug explains:

  • The significant ecommerce opportunity for large audience platforms

  • Specific hidden challenge of ecommerce infrastructure

  • Pitfalls that snag all marketplaces when recruiting merchants (brands)

  • An ideal solution for solving these challenges in an elegant way

This post is packed full of gems for any Marketplace trying to optimize its merchant connections and ecommerce orchestration.  Don’t miss out on these hard won learnings.