Instagram is Rolling Back Live Shopping Feature Next Month: Details

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.

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.