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: according to Meta's platform documentation, product tagging through the Instagram API does not cover every format and account type – Stories, Live and Creator accounts are excluded, and tagging is restricted for accounts without a checkout-enabled shop. Whether an account qualifies can be checked in advance through the eligibility field of the Instagram platform API, which saves you an editorial plan built on a feature that is not there. Meta has restructured this documentation several times since 2023, so check the field names and the eligibility logic against the current version before every project (as of August 2026).