According to an internal document obtained by The Information, Meta Platforms Inc.’s Instagram intends to drastically reduce its shopping options in order to refocus its e-commerce efforts on those that directly produce advertising.
Instagram’s current commerce page will be phased out over time, according to reports. Over the next few months, Instagram will test “Tab Lite,” a less customized and less complicated version of the purchasing page. On Wednesday, the app will launch a public test of the changes that will redirect users to the “Tab Lite” version of the shopping page.
Meta introduced the ‘Shop’ feature in July 2020, which was later expanded to a dedicated shop tab in November 2020. People became accustomed to the convenience of in-app shopping as a result of the global lockdowns at the time. At one point, eCommerce sales exceeded ten years’ worth of online sales progress in just three months.
Many analysts predicted that the ecommerce trend would continue, as the pandemic simply forced more stragglers to try it out. The general consensus was that once the majority of people had experienced in-app shopping and the various benefits it provides, it would become the new normal, hastening the decline of in-person purchasing. For years, eCommerce sales had been steadily increasing.
However, as the threat of the pandemic receded and physical and in-person stores reopened, eCommerce trends returned to where they had been. At the height of the pandemic, the average online percentage of total spending increased significantly from 10.3% in 2019 to 14.9% in 2021, before falling to 12.2% in 2021. It was also observed that, despite the abundance of options, social media users showed no increase in their proclivity to buy in-stream.
