Context

First off, let’s establish a common understanding of just what Instagram shops is and how users use it. Businesses on instagram have the ability to create a shop where they can sell their merchandise such as T-shirts, work out equipment, food, etc. This is available for a wide variety of brands from the mega corporations like adidas to the people with a popular IG account shipping niche t-shirts out of their living room. In the footer of IG, users can tap a shopping bag icon to enter the “Shop” tab. Here users see a visual feed of items they can purchase and alternatively they can view by shop instead of item. Tapping into a particular item gives users the ability to read a description and start the checkout process.

To further frame this Instagram’s mission statement is to capture and share life’s moments. IG Shops helps further this mission statement by letting businesses and users share the items they’ve created with other users of the platform.

Goal

As a feature IG Shops serves two main goals, one giving users a new way of engaging with Instagram as shopping is exciting and two serving as a means of generating revenue for Facebook and the businesses on it’s platform. To ensure the success of those two goals we could monitor the following metrics:

1. Average number of shopping posts viewed per user
2. Total Value of Goods Purchased Per Month

• Less Friction in the check out process
  • More goods sold -> happier businesses
• Non-IG Account Owners can purchase goods
• Less of a barrier to shop, would increase shopping post views

• Have to map their check out email to their IG account or lose association of that purchase if not possible
  • Less data collection, weaker recommendations
• Increase in the number of fraudulent purchases / returns

Testing

Now that we have a decent understanding of some of the potential positive and negative tradeoffs associated with allowing users to checkout without logging in, let’s talk about how we might bring some quantitative clarity to just how much of an impact they might really have.

I would perform an A/B test on a small number of users. Say 1% of the users woud be the control where they need to login to check out and then another 1% of users would receive the treatment where they would not be required to login to check out. In order to assess the impact of some of the above trade offs we could look at things like:

1. Time taken to complete checkout process -> We are assuming checking out will be faster and easier without having to log in.
2. % of checkouts that were fraudulent -> We are assuming there will be an increase in fraud when users don’t need to have IG accounts.
3. % of non-login purchases we are able to connect to an IG account -> Want to measure the scale of data loss we would experience