If you work in Marketing or E-Commerce, chances are you’re familiar with the push from Instagram to promote your products via IG Shops over the past few years. On our end, when we walk a potential brand partner through our product demo, we often get asked to explain the difference between IG Shopping and FERMÀT. If you’re curious about ways we’ve built FERMÀT to be a more comprehensive, data-rich and convenient experience for your product and influencer marketing you’ll definitely want to keep reading!

1. FIRST PARTY DATA OWNERSHIP:

On Instagram, shoppers are presented with an opaque purchase attribution process that makes it difficult for brands to determine where purchases came from. When it comes to customer management, Meta — the company behind Instagram Shopping — retains all marketing rights of the consumer, with the merchant only receiving the information for the purpose of fulfillment. If this piques your interest, you can get more in depth by reading Meta’s privacy policy yourself. This process makes the experience feel more like Amazon than DTC.

FERMÀT in comparison offers 100% purchase attribution with transactions written directly into an eCommerce platform in real-time. Meaning? All that precious and lovely data gathered is owned by the brand, not us. Furthermore, you can track down each purchase, even down to the source of content.

Business as usual logistics and fulfillment is supported, too — all first-party data collected through FERMÀT gets fed back into the merchant’s eCommerce platform automatically once a purchase is made. This means that customers have access to accurate and up-to-date product information throughout their journey. And since all the customer information is provided into the backend, merchants can easily encourage customers to stay engaged long after they’ve made a purchase. Accessing this rich first-party data allows marketers to better understand how their customers interact with their brand online, and optimize future campaigns according to the tactics that perform best for their particular audience(s).

2. CUSTOMIZABILITY & CONTROL

Creating a dynamic, engaging shopping experience for customers isn’t a “one-size-fits-all”. While Instagram offers merchants the ability to curate a selection of products to feature on their shops catalog, there are limited offerings to personalize the experience — and at times, content restrictions prohibit brands from showcasing their true identity.

FERMÀT offers merchants the control to customize storefronts for any piece of content, meaning brands can uniquely curate their product pages — with options for dynamic video creative — across all touchpoints of their target market’s journey, from search to post-purchase engagement.

So why should you choose FERMÀT over Instagram Shopping? Well, aside from having total ownership over your first party data and customer management from initial click through to post-purchase engagement, brands have the flexibility to curate content-native shopping experiences that match any ad they’re running — creating a unique shopping experience that stands out customers and ultimately increases ROAs. Need some convincing? Here are some stats on what other brands have achieved through working with FERMÀT:

So if you’re interested in learning more about how we can help grow your business, book a call with us today!