TECHNOLOGY
By Andrew Asch |
Thursday, January 21, 2021
Social media has minted its own internet celebrities, but many entrepreneurs are trying to judge whether platforms such as
Instagram and
Facebook will make fortunes for retailers.
With the billions of people checking social media every day, these platforms should be natural candidates for shopping. In mid-2020, the platforms, both owned by Facebook Inc., the Menlo Park, Calif., technology conglomerate that earned more than $70 billion in 2019, introduced Instagram Shops and Facebook Shops. In the future, consumers will be able to pay for items through Facebook’s Messenger and Instagram Direct.
The timing to introduce the Shops feature could not be better. 2020 was the year that digital commerce skyrocketed. E-commerce sales increased 49 percent during the 2020 holiday season, according to a report from