Instagram has been working with both ecommerce platforms over the past year to test out features, and is now moving forward with broader deployments. BigCommerce and Shopify also offer merchants ecommerce integrations with the core Facebook platform.
Shopify powers over 500,000 businesses, mostly small and medium-sized, compared to BigCommerces roughly 50,000 merchants.
Instagram has already become an important and growing distribution channel for ecommerce, and these integrations remove friction by enabling in-app purchases of physical products (as opposed to those virtual tractors and other digital consumables that people often buy inside of apps these days).
Instagram is now up to 800 million monthly active users (MAUs), including 500 million daily active users (DAUs) Building out ecommerce is an extension of the ad business that both Facebook and Instagram rely on for monetisation, and handing off tasks like payment processing and merchant support to third-party platforms like Shopify and BigCommerce relieves Facebook of having to develop similar functionalities, while still earning a cut.
It also accelerates adoption among merchants. Instead of having to build up a merchant base on its own, it can tap into large existing merchant bases through Shopify and BigCommerce, and those respective ecommerce platforms will work to help merchants expand multichannel integrations across platforms.
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