Popular social photo-sharing platform Instagram has brought a new feature to Stories and Explore. It has introduced a new shopping feature that will enable the users to shop for the items that they see on stories and explore tabs of the platform. Currently, this feature has been rolled out to businesses based in 46 countries of the globe. Apart from that, a new and exclusive shopping channel has also been added to Explore.
Instagram said that brands will now be able to insert shopping links in their Stories to facilitate the users to shop directly through the app. They will no longer have to visit the shopping portal of a particular brand separately to start shopping. Instagram further said, “Shopping in Stories lets brands tell an even deeper story about what’s behind their products.”
The new shopping feature on Explore will show posts from accounts the user follows and also from accounts that Instagram picks for them based on their preferences. The feature is going live in the US shortly and will be made available in other countries in the coming weeks.
Instagram is also currently testing a new feature that will enable the users to tag their friends in videos. Unlike photos, where all the tagged users are shown in the image itself, the tagged videos will take you to a new page where all the tagged users will be listed.
However, this new feature is currently in the testing phase and may take a few days before it is rolled out to all the users. It is currently available to a handful of users as Instagram wants to get feedback from the public. Instagram also said that the video tags are currently appearing in the app only and not on the desktop version of Instagram.
Instagram is also currently testing a new feature that will help students to find their fellow batch members or mates based on their school. The new feature once rolled out will group the students based on their schools and will help them find their batch mates more easily.
