Is a picture worth a thousand sales? Nordstrom Inc. hopes so.
The upscale department store chain and web retailer early this month launched a project aimed at making it easy for the retailer’s Instagram followers to purchase products it posts on the social network.
“Nearly every time we post a photo to Instagram, customers ask if the item is still available and where they can find it,” says a spokesman for Nordstrom, No. 24 in the Internet Retailer Top 500 Guide.
Earlier this month Nordstrom began posting product images to Instagram with a URL address shoppers could enter to purchase items Nordstrom posts on the social network.
Underneath a photo featuring high-end Nars brand make-up, for example, the retailer wrote, “Keep it simple. Shop our Instagram,” followed by a shortened URL: bit.ly/nordstrominstagram. Instagram limits direct outbound linking from photo descriptions posted to the social network, but consumers who take the time to copy and paste or enter the URL into a web browser are taken to a Nordstrom landing page titled “Picture This” where they can shop the products Nordstrom posts to Instagram.
Sales for a Kate Spade-branded watch spiked dramatically after the retailer posted a photo of the watch on Instagram along with the link to the e-commerce enabled landing page. The day the watch was featured sales grew 10-fold compared to a day earlier, Nordstrom says.
“We wanted an easy, consistent place on our web site for customers to be able to go directly to the items featured on our Instagram account,” the spokesman says.
Nordstrom began developing the program in-house in mid-June and it went live in early July, the retailer says.
Nordstom has a large following on Instagram. In May, customers posted more than 11,000 photos with #nordstrom to their own accounts on Instagram which generated over 485,000 likes and 26,000 comments from their friends, family and other followers. The retailer has 463,325 Instagram followers.