Consider Instagram Checkout for Your Jewelry Marketing Strategy

Have you heard the recent announcement from Instagram about the platform’s new feature called Instagram Checkout? Different from Shopping on Instagram – which allows businesses to add product tags that provide more information and a link to purchase – Checkout allows users to make a purchase without leaving the Instagram app.

Currently, Checkout on Instagram is in closed beta for businesses, which means that only select businesses are able to use it. But soon, all Business Instagram accounts will have access to the new feature, which should be a major game changer for ecommerce. If you haven’t even started using Instagram Shopping, you may be feeling left behind. How are you supposed to keep up with all these changes? We know it can feel overwhelming.

But before you panic and decide to give up the ecommerce game altogether, take a deep breath and remind yourself that Checkout is still in beta. That means you can see how other businesses are using Checkout and learn from their successes and missteps before you implement it yourself. These businesses include Adidas, Burberry, Michael Kors, Nike, Outdoor Voices, and Warby Parker. To see a list of the brands that are starting to use Checkout, visit the official announcement page.

Experts are predicting that shoppers will readily embrace Instagram Checkout, since this feature will only enhance convenience. If shoppers are already spending a lot of time on Instagram and finding things they’d like to buy there, then shopping via Instagram Checkout will streamline the ecommerce experience. One major benefit of Instagram Checkout is that users will be able to easily keep track of their purchases, no matter who the retailer, with shipping and delivery notifications in the app.

In the ecommerce world, competition is fierce, and any way that you can gain a competitive advantage will help you earn more customers. Don’t you want to remove barriers to purchase and make it easy for your customers to buy your products? If so, you’ll want to invest time, money, and energy into the channels where your customers are spending the most time and, for many jewelry brands, that place is Instagram.

It’s true that Instagram will take a percentage of every sale that’s made through Checkout, though it’s not clear yet how much that percentage can be. However, Instagram is providing access to both an ecommerce channel and a potential customer base that you simply wouldn’t be able to build yourself, not with the resources of a small-to-medium-sized business.

At the same time, the arrival of Instagram Checkout doesn’t mean that you can ignore your ecommerce website and rely solely on Instagram for sales. Do you remember when Instagram was down for an entire day in March? Could you imagine how much your sales would plummet if you relied solely on the social media platform and stopped all other marketing efforts?

In 2019 and beyond, omnichannel retail will continue to matter, meaning that any jewelry brand hoping to succeed must be ready to serve its customers across multiple platforms – from in store to an e-commerce website or an alternative shopping channel like Instagram Checkout. The jewelry brand must deliver a consistent and integrated experience across all channels, so a customer never feels like he or she is confined to a specific channel but is interacting with the brand in a multi-layered, multidimensional way across all channels simultaneously.

Solid branding and marketing strategies are the glue that hold together a jewelry brand when customers are interacting with it across all these channels. When considering your Instagram Checkout strategy, remember to ask yourself, “How can we ensure our customers feel the same way about our jewelry brand while shopping on Instagram as they do while shopping our jewelry anywhere else?” The answer may be a little tricky, since you have less control over Instagram than you do over your Shopify site, for example, but the question is still an important one to ask.