Instagram to remove live purchases

Instagram must not be going through its best moment. If Meta, its parent company, carried out a workforce reduction at the end of the year that affected both this social network and its sister Facebook (and plans to lay off more workers soon), Instagram will soon end one of the services with which it intended to establish itself in the world of e-commerce.

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Its live shopping feature, a utility that has been active since 2020 for businesses and content creators, allowing them to tag products seen in an Instagram live feed, will no longer be available as of March 16 this year.

Although live shopping was one of Meta’s key points for its e-commerce breakthrough, the company seems to have “gone back to its roots” due to its poor success. This change comes shortly after Instagram began removing the shopping tab on the home screen, and months after Facebook itself also removed its live shopping feature.

The live shopping feature is very popular in markets such as China, where apps like WeChat or Douyin (TikTok) offer such services, which are very profitable for their companies. When the pandemic began, confinements around the world “encouraged” companies such as Meta to promote digital purchases from retailers, in the hope that they would be “the future of e-commerce”. But it didn’t turn out that way, at least in the West.

After returning to “normal”, both companies and analysts saw that consumers in the United States, one of the strongest global markets, returned to their usual shopping patterns, preferring to continue shopping at outlets and large online platforms such as Amazon, without adopting live shopping.