Instagram CEO Adam Mosseri has announced the end of the Shopping tab. However, the social medium will continue to offer specific shopping functions to creators and companies.
Instagram introduced the Shopping tab at the height of the corona crisis in 2020. To promote the arrival of the new tab, navigation bars were adjusted. For example, the button for creating posts was moved up. Instagram received a lot of criticism after making this change. The Shopping tab was not granted a long life; you will definitely see it disappear from Instagram in February, says Mosseri.
Instagram wants to focus again on entertainment and connection with friends. Tabs like the Shopping tab and its space in the navigation bar detract from that experience. That’s why Instagram is pulling the old layout of the navigation bars from the attic; via the bottom bar you will be able to create posts again. To the right of that button, the platform makes room for the Reels button. The shortcut used to be in the middle of the bar, but now makes way for the button to create content.
The end of the shortcut in the navigation bar also means the end of the Shopping tab. You can therefore no longer reach the tab with items from different creators via a detour. Shops will continue to exist on Instagram for the time being and the company also says it will invest in the shopping experience on the social medium. The continued existence of the Shops means that items – regardless of whether you can buy them on Instagram or not – can be included in the feed, stories, reels, ads and other forms of content.
Shopping insufficiently successful?
There are probably several reasons why Instagram is now ignoring the Shopping tab. First, we suspect the tab was less successful than Instagram hoped. It is also questionable whether users are quick to open the Shopping tab. Plus, this tab was chock-full of items that aren’t necessarily relevant to you. So if you ever opened it, you would probably have disappeared from it quickly.
Above all, Instagram seems to be more attracted to Reels. Special? No. Reels, like almost any form of short-form video, are extremely popular. After TikTok turned out to be a great success, Instagram and YouTube, among others, came up with their own variant of these short videos. At Instagram, they mainly hope to bring back part of the user group that ran away to TikTok.
