Meta-owned photo-sharing platform Instagram is rolling out a new feature that will allow users to buy things from direct messages. The new payments feature will allow users to make purchases from small businesses via direct messages, Meta announced Monday.
According to a blog post shared by the company, users will never have to leave the app or chat to make purchases on Instagram. Currently, users have to exit the position, send a message to a business inquiring about a product to purchase, and then visit the link they provide to make a purchase. The new feature lets users chat about customizations and place orders from there.
In addition, it will be easier to track orders and ask follow-up questions to business owners in the same chat thread. This feature will also give users an option to pay using Meta Pay.
This comes after Instagram announced its new features aimed at creators. The elements came as part of Instagram’s efforts to make Instagram the “best online space for creators to make a living.” The company has introduced subscriber chats, reels, posts, and a subscriber home. Under this tab, users can filter out posts that are only available to them.
Instagram last week also suffered an outage. The outage impacted nearly 24,000 users of Instagram in the wee hours of Friday. Outage tracker Downdetector, on Friday, showed a spike in outage reports between 1 AM and 3 AM in India. The day after, the micro-blogging platform Twitter faced a nearly three-hour outage that affected as many as 50,000 users.
