Instagram to Remove Live Shopping Feature From Next Month: All Details

Instagram has said that it will continue to invest in shopping experiences for people and businesses across feeds, stories, Reels, ads, and more.

Written by Himani Jha, Edited by Richa Sharma | Updated: 15 February 2023 19:22 IST

Photo Credit: Instagram

Instagram will continue to serve other live broadcasting features

Highlights

Instagram will remove the feature from March 16
Users will no longer be able to tag products in live broadcasts
Instagram will still allow users to set up and run their shop

Instagram, the photo-sharing app owned by Meta, is bringing a new feature next month. It will be doing away with the popular live Shop tab from March 16. The feature, announced in 2020, lets creators directly tag products and promote links in their live broadcasts. While the ability to tag links will not be available anymore, other live broadcasting features like scheduling a broadcast, inviting guests to join, and conducting a live Q&A session will continue to exist. Instagram earlier announced rolling back the Shop tab feature in February.

As announced by Meta on its help page, the ability to tag products and links during the live broadcast will be removed from the Instagram starting March 16. The change is being introduced "to focus on products and features that provide the most value to the users," said Meta.

While users may not be able to click on the Shop tab during their lives, the company will continue to invest in the shopping experience within the Instagram app for people and businesses. To promote their creations and business, users can continue to post on other Instagram features such as feeds, stories, reels, and ads. This means users will still be able to set up and run their businesses on Instagram. The app will also continue to offer the same live broadcasting features as before. Some of these include scheduling a live session, inviting users to join live, as well as conducting a live Q&A session.

Samsung Wins Patent for a Tri-Fold Smartphone With Specialised Barrier Layer for Improved Durability

The live shopping feature was added to Instagram in 2020 and is only available in select countries including Canada, the United States, Argentina, Belize, Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Algeria, Armenia, Austria, Belgium, Australia, Bangladesh, Hong Kong, Indonesia, Japan, Singapore, Sri Lanka, Taiwan, and Thailand, among others. The feature was introduced to help small businesses increase their reach and connect to users via Instagram.

Earlier, Instagram announced to removed the Shop tab feature from Instagram in February 2023. The photo-sharing app announced to bring changes to its navigation bar in January 2023. The changes included rolling back of Shop tab from the homepage, replacement of the button to create a new post as well as the Reels button.

The OnePlus 11 5G was launched at the company's Cloud 11 launch event which also saw the debut of several other devices. We discuss this new handset and all of OnePlus' new hardware on Orbital, the Gadgets 360 podcast. Orbital is available on Spotify, Gaana, JioSaavn, Google Podcasts, Apple Podcasts, Amazon Music and wherever you get your podcasts.

Affiliate links may be automatically generated - see our ethics statement for details.

Comments

For the latest tech news and reviews, follow Gadgets 360 on X, Facebook, WhatsApp, Threads and Google News. For the latest videos on gadgets and tech, subscribe to our YouTube channel. If you want to know everything about top influencers, follow our in-house Who'sThat360 on Instagram and YouTube.