Don’t Just Share a Pic of That Meal, Possibly Pay for It, Too, Using Instagram

Everyone knows that Instagram is the place you go if you’re eating out at a restaurant and need to share your meal with the world.

Or maybe you go to Instagram to see what the influencers are wearing, drinking, eating, buying – whatever.

The folks over at Facebook saw a market opportunity in all of this “consumption” and they are now beta testing a payment process via Instagram that would let you buy and pay for things, all within the app.

If that’s not next level, we don’t know what is.

To some, however, this is also a sign of what Instagram is increasingly becoming: A marketplace for consumers rather than a social media community for photos and videos.

Nonetheless, using apps to pay for things is not that strange of a concept in other countries. One prominent example is China which has an extremely robust system for mobile payments through apps.

As far as in who will be handling your payment information, that looks like it is going to be Facebook’s job but the presser on the new Checkout feature states that user information should only be available to Instagram.

A slew of apparel companies signed up for the beta test, including “Adidas, Burberry, H&M, MAC Cosmetics, Nike and Zara” according to DPReview.

Instagram, for its part, takes a sales commission for each purchase made through the app.

That’s not really that shocking since Facebook has made it clear that they are looking for other ways to monetize their services outside of advertising.

Whether or not it takes off largely depends on how powerful the platform’s ability to sell things is at the end of the day. Facebook seems pretty confident in Instagram's ability to do just that and we’re sure that once its fleet of influencers get involved that the ‘Gram could become a huge marketplace for fashion, if nothing else.

Perhaps travel as well or, maybe, as we discussed in the beginning of the article you’ll be able to pay for your meal in the future using Instagram.

Would you buy something through Instagram? Let us know your thoughts in the comments.