Instashop

As we discussed in last week’s essay, Instagram is both a blessing and a curse for Shopify. On the one hand, it is the perfect discovery channel for the type of products that are typically sold by Shopify merchants: visually appealing objects you didn’t even know you wanted (fashion, homeware, furniture, etc). On the other hand, too much reliance o... See more

Facebook Shops and Instagram Shops represent a model of e-commerce that more closely aligns with consumers' natural shopping behavior, combining serendipitous discovery and social inspiration.

When we look back over the past 100 years, traditional commerce (and the culture it indirectly endorsed) was primarily curated by a single person’s point-of-view. Even when commerce moved online, to places like Amazon or Farfetch, retailers still controlled the types of things consumers purchased. Online commerce didn’t innovate a new shopping expe... See more

If commerce is a transaction between buyer and seller, the face of the seller is evolving with new tools for discovery and purchase that allow for a personal relationship between creator and customer. Beyond a corporation or mass retailer, the seller is now frequently a person or small business. We are seeing a new long-tail retailer learning how t... See more

While social media has created opportunities for purchase inspiration similar to a beautifully-merchandised department store window, we’re still in the early days of Instagram Shops. Replicating discovery in the way that people organically find things in-store has so far proved elusive, resulting in fewer opportunities to grow transaction size.

Seven months after adding live video to its social commerce app, Verishop is expanding the feature by building a “pipeline of influencers,” who get paid 10% commission for sales, co-founder and CEO Imran Khan said. It recently brought on Elle magazine as a live video partner.

Instagram remains the most influential and vibrant catalog of visual culture on the planet. Unless it somehow blows the opportunity, it should be able to use that to drive discovery and commerce business over the long run.

So far, curated consumer marketplaces are tied to a brand like Zippy Pantry, Bubble or Amazon. It's a huge engineering challenge to create a central ecommerce API similar to what Carted, Fast and a few others are building out. Additionally, there needs to be an easy solution to creating a self branded marketplace. So whilst a lot of people have wri... See more