Instagram Shopping
Instagram Shopping covers product tags in posts and reels as well as a dedicated shop tab on the profile, through which users discover products and are taken to the merchant's website. The features are based on a product catalogue held in Meta Commerce Manager and are available in many countries worldwide.
In practice
Meta has now discontinued native in-app checkout worldwide, including in the United States, where it was previously offered with selected partners. Product tags therefore lead to the merchant's website everywhere, including in Germany and Austria, while remaining trackable. What matters for visibility is a clean, regularly synchronised product catalogue – often the same feed that is sent to Google Merchant Center – complemented by appealing product photos and reels, since Instagram favours visual content in its shopping surfaces. Factor the limits of the platform API into your planning: Meta's documentation states that product tagging through the Instagram API is supported neither for Stories and Live nor for Instagram Creator accounts, and that since 10 August 2023 some businesses without a checkout-enabled shop can no longer tag their products at all. Whether an account qualifies can be checked in advance through the shopping_product_tag_eligibility field, which saves you an editorial plan built on a feature that is not there.